Nagios Testimonials

“The ease of administration and great price drove us to Nagios. Paying a little for XI was well worth it; it has paid for itself time and time again in saved time and better service delivery.”

"A few years back I started working for a big hospital with around 3.500 employees in the south of The Netherlands as a system and network administrator. That same year the hospital decided to build an Electronic Patient Document system itself. This was a very big commitment. After years of building, testing, and growing it proved to be a big success and our hospital’s patient administration has been paperless since 2008 (the first hospital in the Netherlands to do so!). The IT department that was responsible for the network and system administration was not big and the people had to work hard to keep everything running. There was not a lot of time available for research and development, everything was about the now and the problems that had be solved. Me and three other enthusiastic guys started to make a plan to do everything that we could to improve the reliability of the infrastructure, make it more flexible and cut costs wherever possible. The goal was to get to the point where we could say that we are a professional data center that could easily compete with a commercial one. A part of the plan was to use Nagios as a monitoring system. The main reasons we chose Nagios were that Nagios is very flexible, that you have full control over the tool and that you do not have to depend on a supplier and hire expensive consultants. The return on investment is very high. It was important to us that the Open Source community around Nagios is very active. After we started to use Nagios we got results very quickly. A lot of the simple and time-consuming daily routine tasks were now automated. We started to send text messages for certain critical problems. Known problems that happened daily and needed manual intervention were solved automatically by creating scripts which are run after Nagios detects the problem. A lot of systems in the hospital are connected by interfaces and monitoring these interfaces helped improve the stability and solve problems before the customer noticed that there even was a problem. We started to use graphs so we could analyze the information we got from our systems. Now we are able to make plans for future storage expansions based on valid figures. We can see at what time a certain server has CPU or memory resource problems and how many users are logged into the databases. We monitor the speed of the access to databases, if tables need to be expanded. We use the graphs to cut costs of expensive resources like storage and memory for Virtual Servers. No more staring into the darkness and there is time available for R&D! Nagios has become an important tool for the IT department of the hospital. It helps us to make sure the doctors and nurses can rely on the automated systems that play such a big role in their daily job. So you can say that Nagios helps us treat our patients."