Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Nagios XI and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Server Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Nagios XI vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Though I downplayed the administrative NCC GUI, this is by far the strongest aspect of the Nagios XI product.""It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.""The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers.""You want to monitor a specific metric that nobody else has? You can do it even with the most basic of scripting skills, and you can always share it with the vast community of Nagios Exchange.""The most valuable feature of Nagios XI is customization. We can customize based on our requirements. We can do modifications and implement a lot of scripts. Additionally, it is easy to use.""This is a very good solution and it is simple to use, for any company.""BPI: It allows defining peripherals to map business criticality for efficient monitoring, as required.""Nagios is a custom API manager, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature."

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"The most valuable feature is application monitoring.""Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort.""The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up.""I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users.""AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters.""SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting""I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool.""The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."

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Cons
"The PNP4Nagios plugin not working easily with XI is an issue for me, because some open source monitoring plugins do not work out of the box. But in the end, you learn to live with it.""I would like a much easier GUI so that I can delete events and logs, which will free up a lot of space.""The reporting part should be made simpler. While we can obtain all the reports we need, we always have to create work-arounds to get them.""I would like to see more customization in the network map because it is a bit tricky to use it.""Open-source software is usually not user-friendly.""The Configuration Wizard needs improvement, because not all vendors are present.""The interface could be more user-friendly.""It is really difficult to integrate Nagios XI with another system to generate logs and alert our management of failures in security infrastructure."

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"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions.""Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance.""The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved.""Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc.""Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included.""It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that.""SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us.""The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily."
  • "You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
  • "For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value."
  • "We are using the free version of this solution."
  • "This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years."
  • "The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $3,000 USD per year."
  • "The pricing is high with separate licensing for the product and support."
  • "Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license."
  • More Nagios XI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
  • "When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
  • "Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
  • "I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
  • "Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
  • "SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
  • "Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
  • "The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
  • More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
    Top Answer:I don't deal with the licensing aspect of the product.
    Top Answer:The product's stability could be even better.
    Top Answer:The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet… more »
    Top Answer:Among the major monitoring solutions, especially considering that free monitoring tools are available, it is relatively affordable. When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out… more »
    Top Answer:The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts.
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 42 in Server Monitoring
    Views
    5,760
    Comparisons
    4,516
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    329
    Rating
    8.1
    12th
    out of 42 in Server Monitoring
    Views
    1,741
    Comparisons
    1,179
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    427
    Rating
    7.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    SolarWinds SAM
    Learn More
    Overview

    Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Third-party add-ons provide tools for monitoring virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.

    Nagios XI uses a powerful Core 4 monitoring engine that provides users with the highest levels of server monitoring performance. This high degree of performance enables nearly limitless scalability and monitoring powers.

    With Nagios XI, stakeholders can check up on their infrastructure status using the role-based web interface. Sophisticated dashboards enable access to monitoring information and third-party data. Administrators can easily set up permissions so users can only access the infrastructure they are authorized to view.

    Nagios XI Benefits and Features

    Some of the benefits and top features of using Nagios XI include:

    • Extensive IT infrastructure monitoring: Comprehensively monitor all of your organization’s infrastructure’s components. Hundreds of third-party add-ons let you monitor virtually any internal application, service, or system.

    • Proactivity: With built-in, automated trend analysis and capacity planning charts, organizations can plan infrastructure upgrades before legacy systems encounter unexpected issues. IT staff, business stakeholders, and end users are notified via email or SMS with details of the outage so they can begin handling the issue immediately.

    • Multiple integration options: Numerous available APIs allow seamless integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting capabilities as well as custom interfaces are available, allowing you to customize Nagios XI to your company's needs.

    • Complete visibility: Get a single view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. The Nagios XI dashboards provide at-a-glance access to monitoring information and third-party data. Views give users quick access to the most useful information.

    • User-friendly interface: Customize the layout, design, and settings for each user’s GUI, providing clients and team members with the flexibility they need. Administrators can easily delegate control over monitoring configuration management, system settings, and more to end users and team members using the built-in web-based configuration interface. A configuration wizard guides users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications without understanding complex monitoring concepts.

    • Configuration snapshots: Snapshots allow you to save and archive your most recent configurations. Later on, you can revert back to them whenever you like.

    • Advanced user management: Ensure a secure infrastructure environment by easily setting up and managing user accounts and assigning custom roles with just a few mouse clicks.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Nagios XI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its integration options and monitoring abilities, as well as its alerting features.

    David P., a senior DevOps engineer at EML Payments Ltd, writes, “We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.”

    An IT-OSS manager at a comms service provider notes, “Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.”

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

    Sample Customers
    Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
    Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider32%
    Manufacturing Company24%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Retailer8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization47%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Construction Company14%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization40%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise35%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise48%
    Large Enterprise41%
    Buyer's Guide
    Nagios XI vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Nagios XI vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Nagios XI is ranked 4th in Server Monitoring with 54 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 12th in Server Monitoring with 36 reviews. Nagios XI is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Nagios XI writes "Great for monitoring IT services infrastructure with nice tools and helpful notifications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Nagios XI is most compared with Zabbix, Nagios Core, PRTG Network Monitor, Icinga and WhatsUp Gold, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and PRTG Network Monitor. See our Nagios XI vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.

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    We monitor all Server Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.