About Nagios
Nagios is a great success story of OpenSource software. It is a flexible monitoring system build with a core set of features, a fast and responsive web interface and a simple API to create custom plugins in any language of choice. First established in small and medium IT organisations, with commercial support available even large companies moved to Nagios as their main monitoring solution.
In 2000 I discovered NetSaint, which was later renamed Nagios. We needed operational monitoring for our production firewalls, proxies and load balancers, and NetSaint turned out to be a great tool. In the old days, installing the software meant collecting necessary sources, making sure not to miss a dependency. Almost every component required compilation. With increasid popularity Nagios was packaged into Linux distributions. However commercial UNIX systems were more common and I was running NetSaint v0.0.6 on a SUN server under Solaris 8, which was also doubling as the central log collection system.
In 2008 I deployed Nagios with enterprise scope, monitoring about 1.500 systems with over 5.000 service checks across three Asia datacenters. This included about 300 servers, 700 network devices and 500 networked print centers. Nagios provided the data for independend service provider SLA-monitoring, and graphing of short and longterm trends became the base for capacity and performance planning. Deployment, test and QA teams are very keen on using Nagios data to evaluate application performance in UAT and burn-in tests. For service Outsourcing, Nagios provides automated alert escalation to respective service providers. Its modular, extendable design enabled the rapid development of monitoring plugins to address new devices and applications, and the active community is a great resource to draw upon.
Nagios upgrade version history
This site provides documentation, plugins and how-tos to contribute back to the community. There is also a live Nagios instance online.
| Date | Version | Operating System |
|---|---|---|
| 2011-08-14 | Nagios 3.3.1 | OpenSuse 11.4 |
| 2014-05-10 | Nagios Core 4.0.6 | OpenSuse 12.3 |
| 2015-03-16 | Nagios Core 4.1.0 | Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) |
| 2017-05-14 | Nagios Core 4.3.2 | Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) |
| 2018-01-02 | Nagios Core 4.3.4 | Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) |
| 2018-09-15 | Nagios Core 4.4.2 | Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) |
| 2019-03-23 | Nagios Core 4.4.3 | Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) |
| 2020-03-03 | Nagios Core 4.4.5 | Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) |
| 2020-12-13 | Nagios Core 4.4.6 | Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) |
| 2022-05-17 | Nagios Core 4.4.7 | Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) |
| 2022-11-13 | Nagios Core 4.4.8 | Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) |
| 2022-12-11 | Nagios Core 4.4.9 | Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) |
| 2023-03-22 | Nagios Core 4.4.10 | Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) |
| 2023-06-12 | Nagios Core 4.4.13 | Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) |
| 2023-12-25 | Nagios Core 4.5.0 | Debian 12 (Bookworm) |