Using Nagios for small business infrastructure monitoring

Nagios, or Nagios-inspired software, are indeed still relevant. A few years ago a few friends and I were using Icinga2 (and some Nagios plugins) to monitor our (personal) VPSes and services and we were very happy about it.

Nagios is fine, in the end of the day it's just a pretty UI over "cronjobs". If you just need point in time monitoring (is something up/down right now), it will be ok.

However when it comes to collecting broader data like request rates, bandwidth, performance stats it becomes tricky as all of that is based on RRDtool which isn't very flexible as Prometheus.

I wrote this thing https://github.com/Vaelatern/gokrazy-statuspage as a kind of clone of https://monitoror.com/ with an emphasis on stateless monitoring.

Enough to extend, easy to put up on a rpi on a dedicated screen, enough to give a small business owner confidence their stuff is operating.

At least that's why I wrote it.

I have not used Nagios in 20 years, and wouldn't again. We used Sensu many years ago and it basically fixed all my pet peeves, wonder how it's doing.

But for any monitoring solution I prefer stuff that works with Nagios plugins, that is still true in 2026, although I haven't had to choose stuff for a while.