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.

DateVersionOperating System
2011-08-14Nagios 3.3.1OpenSuse 11.4
2014-05-10Nagios Core 4.0.6OpenSuse 12.3
2015-03-16Nagios Core 4.1.0Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)
2017-05-14Nagios Core 4.3.2Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)
2018-01-02Nagios Core 4.3.4Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)
2018-09-15Nagios Core 4.4.2Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)
2019-03-23Nagios Core 4.4.3Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver)
2020-03-03Nagios Core 4.4.5Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver)
2020-12-13Nagios Core 4.4.6Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
2022-05-17Nagios Core 4.4.7Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
2022-11-13Nagios Core 4.4.8Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
2022-12-11Nagios Core 4.4.9Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
2023-03-22Nagios Core 4.4.10Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
2023-06-12Nagios Core 4.4.13Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
2023-12-25Nagios Core 4.5.0Debian 12 (Bookworm)
2024-05-03Nagios Core 4.5.2Debian 12 (Bookworm)