Nagios XI

• RHEL/CentOS/Oracle 10 support

XI now supports installation on EL 10 operating systems!

• Roles

Now you can manage user permissions both individually and using Roles for role-based access control with blanket presets.

• The Wizard Builder and new Declarative Wizard format

The new Declarative Wizard format provides a modernized, more AI-friendly approach to writing custom wizards in JSON, and the Wizard Builder gives you a step-by-step method for creating custom wizards right in the GUI.

• New experimental navigation

A new experimental navigation structure is also loaded in this release, including a nested left-hand navbar, user settings moved to the bottom left, and additional options at the top of the UI. To try it out, navigate to Admin > System Config > System Settings > General tab, and enable it in the Experimental Features section.

Nagios Log Server

• OpenSearch disk usage alerting

You can now activate a notice at the top of the UI, and color-code the advanced Home menu’s Total OpenSearch Disk Usage panel red, when usage exceeds a threshold you set. You can activate this feature in the Admin > General > Global Settings menu, in the OpenSearch Disk Usage Alerting section.

• Manage TLS/SSL Certificates page

In previous versions, SSL certificates were managed in the LDAP/AD Integration menu. Now that certificates may also be used for the event-based collection with the Fusion producer, management has been moved to its own new menu in 2026R2. Certificate management is now handled in the Admin > Management > Manage TLS/SSL Certificates menu.

Nagios Network Analyzer

• Navbar update with new Integrations tab

You’ll notice some changes to the left-hand navigation bar, including a new Integrations section where Suricata, Wireshark, Nmap, and the new Fusion event-based collection settings are now nested.

• Suricata Dashlet

The new Suricata Dashlet will help make sure you see new SID alerts quickly in your custom dashboards.

• Source Group Dashlet options

New Group options have been added to many of the available dashlets, enabling you to leverage your Source Groups to filter the data shown.

• Traceroutes retention time

You’ll see a new Settings icon at the top of the main Traceroutes tab that you can use to configure how long NNA should hold onto your traceroute data.

• Wireshark scans of multiple interfaces

You can now select multiple interfaces when you run Wireshark packet captures.

• System Profile

You can now generate a System Profile file right from the UI in the Administration > System > System Profile menu to help the Support team quickly understand your setup.

Nagios Fusion

Fusion 2026R2 is the result of a tremendous amount of work by a team of top developers at Nagios this year. This release is a complete re-imagining and modernizing of the solution, both under the hood and in the user interface.

You can take a peek at this article for details on all the big changes, along with links to additional resources to help you explore further. Central visibility of your Nagios XI, Core, Log Server, and Network Analyzer data has never looked better!

Another great resource is the fully updated Getting Started guide:

But did you know you can use URLs as the background for your maps? In this article, we’ll explore a cool use case for this capability by overlaying a National Weather Service radar map with active object status icons in Nagios XI in a few simple steps.

1. Creating a Map

First, create a fresh Regular map. If you’re new to NagVis, you can find basic instructions here:

Full instructions can be found in this guide:

No need to add anything to it yet. First we’ll get the background loaded.

2. Config File Setup

To use a URL as the background of a map, establish a terminal session with your Nagios XI server, and open the map’s.cfg file with a text editor. In this example, we’ll use vi.

First, move to the maps directory:

cd /usr/local/nagvis/etc/maps/

cd /usr/local/nagvis/etc/maps/

Next, open the .cfg file of the target map, replacing mapname in this command with the actual map filename:

vi mapname.cfg

vi mapname.cfg

In the global section add this line, replacing URL with the URL to use as the background. Note that the square brackets are required; your URL will go between them.

map_image=[URL]

map_image=[URL]

That section should look something like the following after you edit it (you can use the URL shown here to use an NWS radar map, or add the URL of your choice) :

define global {
object_id=0
map_image=[https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/CONUS-LARGE_loop.gif]
grid_show=0
}

define global {
object_id=0
map_image=[https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/CONUS-LARGE_loop.gif]
grid_show=0
}

Save your changes to the file to finalize this step.

3. Add Your Icons

Now you can head back to your map in Nagios XI and start adding icons and lines, for a final result similar to this:

Tips

• The zoombar function is a handy feature to enable on large backgrounds such as a country-wide radar map. To enable it, go to Edit Map > Map Options > Appearance tab, check the zoombar box and choose Yes in the dropdown, then click Save. You’ll now see a zoombar on the upper left of your map which you can use to zoom in and out of your map.

• You may see a map_image setting error as shown in the screenshot below when using a URL, but this can be disregarded.

Try It Out

If you haven’t tried out Nagios XI yet, you can learn more about its robust monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting capabilities and find the fully functional free trial version here:

Happy mapping!

Also included are details on creating and managing users and Roles.

Understanding User Rights and Roles in Nagios XI 2026R2

Declarative Wizards are a brand-new Nagios XI Configuration Wizard format that is designed to streamline the process of creating wizards. The Declarative Wizard format is primarily composed of a JSON file that contains metadata, steps, hosts & services, plugins, and requirements to build a form that can be used to configure hosts and services in Nagios XI. Unlike the traditional Configuration Wizards, form items are not built directly as HTML, but instead by selecting an input type, which will get converted into a preset form item at runtime.

The Wizard Builder provides a step-by-step wizard which enables you to create custom Declarative Wizards right in the 2026R2+ user interface.

Resources

This document describes how to use the Wizard Builder page to create and manage custom Declarative Wizards in Nagios XI 2026R2+:

• Using the Wizard Builder in Nagios XI 2026R2+

This document describes the structure of the Declarative Wizard configuration wizard format and
how it differs from traditional Configuration Wizards.

• Understanding the Declarative Wizard Format in Nagios XI 2026R2+

Fusion 2026R2 represents complete re-imagining of the solution, both under the hood and in the user interface. In this article we’ll dig into the exciting changes and updates, and provide links to additional resources to help you explore 2026R2 further. Central visibility of your Nagios XI, Core, Log Server, and Network Analyzer data has never looked better!

Crisp New Web Interface

We’ll begin with the most obvious change: the user interface, which has been rebuilt from the ground up.

The updated interface provides a sleek, responsive modern platform to configure and interact with your fused servers on, and includes both a light and dark theme.

Dashboards

Over the last couple years, streamlined React-based dashboards have been rolled into Nagios Log Server, Nagios XI Smart Dashboards, and Nagios Network Analyzer. Now, they’ve hit Fusion in 2026R2!

The new dashboard approach provides crisp visual data in customizable dashlets. Choose from a variety of ready-made templates, or start from scratch with the new Blank option. Resizing and re-arranging your panels is a breeze, and Roles (discussed below) make it easy to limit select users to visibility and control of only their own dashboards, or to give them global access. Full details on using dashboards and dashlets can be found here:

Using Dashboards in Nagios Fusion 2026R2

Users and Roles

2026R2 also supports a new Roles feature, enabling you to use RBAC (role-based access control) to define permission sets and quickly apply them to new and existing users. Role permissions include items like Dashboards, Views, Servers (i.e. fused Nagios servers), and API access. You can review the following guide for more details:

Managing Users and Roles in Nagios Fusion 2026R2

Event-Based Collection

Another exciting enhancement you’ll find in 2026R2 is the new Event-Based collection method. This enables you to send alert data upstream to Fusion from your Nagios XI, Log Server, and Network Analyzer servers when problems are found and state changes occur. Note that this feature requires XI, NLS, and NNA 2026R2+.

This brand new approach for feeding live alert data to Fusion is sure to provide value. Rather than the current sole approach of polling the remote Nagios servers on a set interval, the fused servers themselves will send alert data upstream to 2026R2. By employing both approaches, you’ll be able to use a less aggressive polling interval to grab all of the data periodically, and can rely on the Event-Based feed for catching important live events rapidly when they occur.

These rapid results will display both in the Alert History section of the Overview pages for your fused servers, and in dashlets you create using the alert_history InfluxDB endpoint.

You can learn more about fusing your Nagios servers with 2026R2, and about setting up Event-Based collection, here:

Managing Fused Servers in Nagios Fusion

Powerful REST API

2026R2 also includes a brand new, robust, and fully documented API which can be used to fetch data about and programmatically manage most aspects of the system. You can learn more about the API usage and explore the available endpoints here:

Using the REST API in Fusion 2026R2

SSL setup script

If you wish to use SSL/TLS for a secure https connection to the web interface, a new setup script takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting. You can find full setup details here:

Configuring SSL/TLS in Fusion 2026R2

Migrating to 2026R2

Since 2026R2 is built on entirely new frameworks and components, there will not be an inline upgrade option. However, there will be a migration path you can use to move much of your user and fused server data from legacy Fusion to 2026R2. You can find details on this process here:

Migrating to Nagios Fusion 2026R2

Resources

The free trial version is a great way to explore the power of 2026R2:

Nagios Fusion Free Trial Download

The Admin Guide is an excellent resource to help you locate the documentation you need to get things going:

Nagios Fusion Admin Guide

Here’s a video overview of Fusion’s interface and features:

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to sales@nagios.com so we can assist you further.

To that end, I created a demo environment for each Nagios Monitoring Solution. I’ve tried to make the demo environment as robust as possible but have been limited by the hardware I could get my hands on. For example, if I want to monitor a switch, I have the option of monitoring a demo switch, sitting on the network somewhere, or monitoring a production switch. The former shows very little real-world data, the latter comes with the risk of accidentally sharing something that we don’t want to be shared with the rest of the world.

No longer.

In our rebuild of the demo environment, we’re hoping to go several steps further: isolating the environment into its own little corner. This means that all traffic would be related to the demo environment. We could also extract the little corner of the network to bring with us to conferences, as well as add new and novel devices for monitoring.

But before I get too far into it, let’s start at the beginning.

The Challenge: Limitations of the Current Environment

As I touched on in the introduction, there are some limitations of the current demo environment.

Network Limitations

Probably the first, and most irritating limitation is trying to demo the basic monitoring of a switch. The switch that we have in the demo environment is a perfectly capable switch, but there’s no real traffic going over it. The systems that make up the demo environment all connect to one of our production switches, which I don’t have access to.

But seriously, I could probably show off throughput and port status of a production switch, but when we dig into flow data with Nagios Network Analyzer, now we’re starting to show off what IP addresses, internal and potentially external, that different systems are talking to. And that makes me a little uneasy.

Clusters and Virtualization

A lot of what we currently have in the demo environment is a mixture of theater of the mind, and smoke and mirrors. To demonstrate Business Process Intelligence, I have a cluster of six web servers, where one web server is down. The truth? Five of those web servers are the same server, just being monitored multiple times. The one web server that is down? Just an IP address that we know is not in use.

Would you like to know what it looks like to monitor a virtualization environment? Sorry. We have an environment that we’re using, but similar to the issue with demoing network gear, we don’t want to risk showing off something crucial in our production environment. I can tell you what each of the wizards will do. But showing is better than telling.

Conferences: How We Currently Ship Our Demo Environment

We like going to tech conferences. Right now, we regularly attend the Red Hat Summit. There are some rumblings that we might sneak in another conference, but for right now, Red Hat is the big one. The trouble we run into is how we want to run demos.

It used to be that we would just VPN into the office and run demos against our normal demo environment. Connectivity at Red Hat has been pretty good to us, but that isn’t something we can count on everywhere we go. What we’ve done for the last two conferences is bring a mini rack or two with us, with a copy of the demo environment.

This was amazingly useful but carried its own drawbacks. Getting a copy of the demo environment to the mini rack environment would take time, and as soon as it was there, the clock was ticking. We would have a block of empty performance data starting the moment we began the transfer, which is often a week, sometimes two before the shipping deadline.

The Rebuild: Goals for the New Environment

With the biggest of the limitations listed out, let’s dive into the goals for the new demo environment.

New Environment Design

Networking: A Dedicated Juniper Switch and a New Wizard Request

Instead of having a demo switch with all of one out of 48 ports actually up and in use, we have a brand-new Juniper switch which will have all of the demo environment hooked up to it. Without spoiling that too much, we’re looking at 10 devices, at least, being plugged directly into the switch. Still a far cry from the 48 total ports being in use, but it’ll be a lot easier to show off 10 ports that are actually in use, versus one port that is just connected so we can get data from it.

This will allow us to show proper throughput utilization, as well as NetFlow data. Hey, as long as we’re here, how would you, our customers, feel about a Juniper Switch Wizard? To say the least, I am hyped for this.

Real Clusters: OpenShift and Proxmox VE

Our two mini racks are destined to become our new permanent demo environment. Rather than running the environment on the same virtualization infrastructure as our production systems, we’ll be able to demo an actual Red Hat OpenShift cluster, as well as a Proxmox VE cluster! These will give us real clusters that we can see in Business Process Intelligence, as well as real systems to demo our OpenShift and Proxmox Wizards against. No more theater of the mind!

Conferences: Built to Travel

With the new setup, we plan to have the demo environment sit on its own little section of the network where we can literally just grab the Juniper switch, and everything connected to it (save for the uplink to the production network of course), and just roll to a conference. In the limitations section, one of the issues is the length of the gap in performance data. There’s going to be a certain amount of gap in the data, just because we’re shipping the environment a few days before the conference. But previously we’d take a copy of the demo environment and put it on the machines. Unfortunately, all of that could happen up to a couple of weeks before we needed to ship the environment. So, we’ve minimized the data gap from potentially a couple of weeks to a few days.

Physical Design at a Glance

• Juniper 48 port switch
• HP mini servers
• Fashionable 10-inch racks
• Proxmox cluster
• Red Hat OpenShift cluster
• Cyberpower UPSes

What’s Next

We’ll post updates as this project moves forward, so stay tuned.

Part of the goal here is setting up for more articles and videos down the line. So if there’s future content you’d like to see, from us in general or something specific, we want to hear about it—let us know by emailing us at marketing@nagios.com.

This environment gives us the chance to build the content you actually want to see. We’re not in it for the views. We’re in it for the knowledge sharing.

You can find full details in the following guide:

• Monitoring Akamai Cloud Instances with Nagios XI

Zabbix, for its part, offers both a free open-source on-premises version and a paid cloud-hosted option, each with extensive built-in templates.

Choosing the right monitoring solution comes down to your team’s technical resources, infrastructure needs, and how you plan to scale.

What are Zabbix and Nagios? A Brief Background:

Nagios has been around since 1999 and is one of the most widely adopted monitoring tools in infrastructure monitoring. It offers a free open-source product (Nagios Core) and enterprise solutions, including Nagios XI, Log Server, Network Analyzer, and Fusion. Nagios XI builds on Core with centralized dashboards, Configuration Wizards, reporting, bundled support, and is a highly flexible, scalable, and extensible tool. For a better understanding between the Core and XI, see the article: Nagios Core vs Nagios XI.

Zabbix emerged in the early 2000s and has grown into a widely deployed open-source platform with extensive built-in templates. Zabbix On-Premise is a free open source solution, while Zabbix Cloud is a paid solution that’s designed for teams that want the Zabbix feature set on a cloud-hosted platform with less manual setup.

Zabbix vs. Nagios: Quick Comparison

Why IT Teams Choose Nagios XI

• Predictable annual costs matter: Nagios XI is licensed per node, so you’re not subject to the per-metric cost escalation that cloud platforms typically impose.
• You operate in healthcare, government, finance, logistics, or any regulated industry where on-premises data control is a compliance requirement.
• Your team needs to be operational quickly.
• You want vendor-backed support without a separate contract.
• You prefer minimal internal maintenance overhead without giving up monitoring capability.

Key Decision Factors for Evaluating Monitoring Solutions

Features matter, but they’re not the whole picture. Deployment model, internal staffing, compliance requirements, and long-term maintenance all shape what a platform actually costs and how well it fits your environment.

1. Implementation and Integration

How do Nagios XI and Zabbix Handle Setup and Deployment?

With a Nagios XI Quickstart session, along with guided setup Wizards, XI can get most teams monitoring infrastructure within minutes. Common components (servers, switches, firewalls, cloud services) can often be configured through guided workflows without manual file editing.

Beyond fast setup, Nagios XI gives teams access to thousands of plugins on Nagios Exchange, letting IT teams monitor virtually any component in their environment without building custom integrations from scratch. Teams that need out-of-the-box coverage often find this combination reduces implementation time considerably compared to manual configuration.

Zabbix On-Prem requires more hands-on setup. Configuration is largely manual, and getting a full deployment production-ready typically takes longer. Zabbix does ship with strong built-in capabilities (auto-discovery tools and hundreds of templates), but for teams without dedicated monitoring engineers, that setup investment adds up fast.

Zabbix Cloud reduces manual setup overhead but comes with tradeoffs. Monitoring data lives externally on hosted infrastructure—a compliance issue for teams in regulated industries like healthcare, government, or finance. Costs are also structured per device, per metric, and storage size each month, which can escalate quickly as your infrastructure grows, compared to Nagios XI’s predictable per-node pricing model.

Some teams comparing Nagios to other monitoring software come in with concerns about setup and maintenance—but it’s important to note that those concerns largely stem from Nagios Core, not Nagios XI. Also worth a read: why Nagios remains relevant in today’s IT environments.

2. Maintenance and Support

Nagios XI bundles vendor-backed support directly into the license: 10 support cases per year with a one-business-day response time and a dedicated Customer Success Manager. Support and maintenance are included for the first year, with optional annual renewal for continued access to updates, premium wizards, and case support. For teams where support is a budget line item, the difference between a bundled model and a separate contract can easily affect the total cost of ownership.

Both Zabbix On-Premise and Zabbix Cloud have support and maintenance options, but both require a separate subscription for vendor support. Zabbix offers multiple paid tiers depending on how much coverage a team needs, with higher tiers including guaranteed SLAs, dedicated Customer Success Managers, remote troubleshooting, and phone support. Without a support contract, however, teams rely on community forums and documentation, which are extensive and actively maintained, though response times and resolution depend on community availability rather than a guaranteed SLA.

3. Data Sovereignty

With both Nagios XI and Zabbix On-Premise, infrastructure stays on your own hardware. You control where your monitoring data lives—often a hard requirement in regulated industries.

Zabbix Cloud hosts monitoring infrastructure externally, handles updates automatically, and works well for organizations without strict compliance constraints. The tradeoff: dependency on hosted service availability.

For a closer look at how on-premises and cloud deployments compare, see our comparison for on-prem vs. cloud monitoring and our article on cloud repatriation.

Final Takeaways

Zabbix and Nagios are both proven platforms. But when total cost of ownership, deployment speed, support, and on-premises control enter the equation, Nagios XI has a clear advantage.

Already on Nagios Core? Migrating from Core to XI is easy; check out the roadmap to upgrade.

Still weighing your options? Try Nagios XI for free for 30 days.

And if you’re wanting to see a price estimate, check out the Nagios XI Plan Calculator.

You can find full details in the following documentation:

• Monitoring Proxmox VE with Nagios XI

You can find full details in the following documentation:

• Using the Nutanix CE Wizard in Nagios XI