Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Nagios VS LibreNMS

Compare Nagios VS LibreNMS and see what are their differences

Nagios logo Nagios

Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

LibreNMS logo LibreNMS

A fully featured network monitoring system that provides a wealth of features and device support.
  • Nagios Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • LibreNMS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-20

Nagios features and specs

  • Extensive Community Support
    Nagios has a large and active user community, which means you can easily find help and resources online. There are numerous plugins and add-ons developed by the community that can extend the functionality of Nagios.
  • Highly Customizable
    Nagios is highly customizable and flexible. It allows you to tailor monitoring to suit your specific needs, including creating custom plugins, modifying configuration files, and integrating with other tools.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Nagios provides detailed monitoring of network services, host resources, and infrastructure systems. This includes the ability to monitor CPU load, disk usage, memory, and more.
  • Alerting and Notification
    Nagios has robust alerting and notification features that ensure you can stay informed of any issues or downtime. Alerts can be sent via email, SMS, or other communication channels.
  • Scalable
    Nagios is scalable and can grow with your organization. It supports a large number of hosts and services, making it suitable for both small and large enterprises.

Possible disadvantages of Nagios

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Nagios can be quite complex to set up and configure, especially for newcomers. The learning curve is steep, requiring time and effort to fully understand and utilize its capabilities.
  • Manual Configuration
    A significant amount of configuration is manual, particularly in the open-source version. This can be time-consuming and prone to human error, especially in larger environments.
  • Interface
    The user interface of Nagios is often considered outdated and less intuitive compared to other modern monitoring tools. The web interface can be difficult to navigate and is not as visually appealing.
  • Performance Issues
    Nagios can experience performance issues, particularly when monitoring a large number of hosts and services. It can become resource-intensive, requiring careful optimization and tuning.
  • Cost of Enterprise Version
    The enterprise version of Nagios, Nagios XI, comes with a significant cost. While it offers additional features, support, and a more user-friendly interface, it might not be affordable for all organizations.

LibreNMS features and specs

  • Open Source
    LibreNMS is open-source software, allowing you to customize, modify, and distribute it freely. This also means it has a community of contributors who help improve and maintain the project.
  • Vendor-Agnostic
    Supports a wide range of network devices and vendors, making it a versatile network monitoring tool capable of managing heterogeneous environments.
  • Scalability
    Designed to scale from small office networks to large data center environments, ensuring it can grow with your network infrastructure needs.
  • Auto Discovery
    Includes automatic network discovery capabilities which help in identifying and adding devices to the monitoring system effortlessly.
  • Extensive Features
    Offers a robust set of features including alerting, graphing, and support for a variety of network protocols (e.g., SNMP, ICMP, BGP).
  • Integration
    Integrates well with other tools and services such as RANCID, Collectd, Nagios, and more, enhancing its capabilities in various IT ecosystem setups.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Provides an intuitive web-based interface that makes it easier for administrators to navigate and use the tool effectively.

Possible disadvantages of LibreNMS

  • Complex Initial Setup
    The initial setup can be complex and time-consuming, especially for users who are not familiar with network monitoring systems.
  • Resource Intensive
    Requires significant server resources (CPU, memory, disk space) as your network grows, which could necessitate infrastructure upgrades.
  • Learning Curve
    Has a steep learning curve for new users, particularly those who are not experienced with network monitoring tools.
  • Documentation
    While there is documentation available, it can sometimes be lacking in detail or out-of-date, making it difficult for users to troubleshoot or fully utilize all features.
  • Community Support
    Relies heavily on community support which can be inconsistent and may not always provide timely solutions for critical issues.
  • Third-Party Dependencies
    Requires several third-party dependencies for full functionality, making the setup process more complicated and sometimes leading to compatibility issues.

Nagios videos

Stop using Nagios - Andy Sykes

More videos:

  • Review - Bernd Erk - Why favour Icinga over Nagios
  • Review - How Nagios XI Works

LibreNMS videos

Network Monitoring - LibreNMS

More videos:

  • Review - NLNOG day 2017 - Neil Lathwood (LibreNMS) - Monitoring Everything
  • Review - [LibreNMS] Explaining alert rules
  • Tutorial - Introduction to LibreNMS and Prime Features - LibreNMS
  • Tutorial - LibreNMS Application -Apache

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Nagios and LibreNMS)
Monitoring Tools
81 81%
19% 19
Log Management
80 80%
20% 20
Performance Monitoring
75 75%
25% 25
Website Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Nagios and LibreNMS

Nagios Reviews

11 Best Nagios Alternatives (Free & Open Source) in 2024
Nagios is an open source network monitoring solution. It helps organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure issues. However, Nagios could be difficult integrate into automatic provisioning processes. There are few other issues with Nagios as well. Here, is a curated list of top tools that can replace Nagios. This list consists of paid as well as open-source...
Source: www.guru99.com
The Best Nagios Alternatives for Server, Application and Network Monitoring
Nagios is a very strong system monitoring package but its ability to compete in both the free and paid system monitoring market is frequently challenged. The free tool is very comprehensive. However, the Nagios team has taken away the traffic analysis functions from this, moving them off into a separate paid tool, which puts Nagios Core at a disadvantage when compared to...
The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
It’s also important to note that Nagios is completely open-source, which means that it’s free to use. However, “free to use” doesn’t mean that it won’t cost you anything. Often, the reason users look for alternatives to tools like Nagios is because of their open-source nature. Self-hosting a tool of this magnitude can be even more expensive than purchasing a SaaS subscription.
Source: betterstack.com
The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
Nagios is free for small environments with seven or fewer nodes and hosts. Its paid version starts at $1995 for the license and is priced per user. There is also a variety of free training options for Nagios available online. Both of Nagios’ paid versions include a free trial.
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Nagios Core is an open-source Linux/Unix systems monitoring and alerting tool that can be extended through custom plugins, providing flexible Linux server monitoring. It remotely executes different plugins (executables or scripts) on your Linux server using the NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) add-on, which gives you comprehensive monitoring data, including OS metrics,...
Source: sematext.com

LibreNMS Reviews

The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
LibreNMS is a fully-fledged network monitoring system supporting various device types and vendors, including Linux, Foundry, Cisco, and many others. As a result, it’s one of the most accessible tools on this list to use straight out of the box. In addition, its autodiscovery features help you spend as little time as possible setting it up.
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: LibreNMS is an open source network monitoring system that uses several network protocols to observe every device on your network. The LibreNMS API can retrieve, manage, and graph the data it collects and supports horizontal scaling to grow its monitoring capabilities alongside your network. The tool features a flexible alerting system that is tailor-made to...
Top 10 PRTG Alternatives for Monitoring Networks and IT Infrastructure
Observium is similar to LibreNMS (which is a fork of it) and comes in Enterprise, Professional and Community Editions, so you have a free version if you want to try it out. It is more a network centric tool instead of a systems monitoring tool.
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
LibreNMS is a fully featured network monitoring system. It is based on PHP/MySQL/SNMP. LibreMNS covers a wide range of operating systems and network hardware.
Source: geekflare.com
13 Best Nagios Alternatives for Networks, Servers, IT Systems Monitoring
During the setup process, LibreNMS automatically discovers individual devices and end-points using various protocols such as CDP, FDP, LLDP, OSPF, BGP, SNMP and ARP. Users don’t need to spend hours adding individual devices to be monitored.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Nagios and LibreNMS, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Observium - Observium

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Icinga - Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.