Say that NetHAM overcomes all limitations mentioned in Section 3.1. Future work includes
implementation that will try to solve limitations mentioned in Section 3.2.
5. Conclusion
Network monitoring is an important component for good network management. Open-source
network monitoring is a sensible choice for organizations that do not have budget for a commercial
product. Nagios is one of the most popular open-source network monitoring tools as seen from its large
community of users, its download volume, and its search trend. This article investigates strengths and
limitations of Nagios from the experiences of Nagios users and developers. We highlight two types of
limitations—ones that can be addressed by add-ons and plugins and ones where none of existing addons
or plugins can help. In most cases the native Nagios architecture is the limiting factor. We then
present our new model of network monitoring tool, called NetHAM, developed over the Nagios
framework. NetHAM is able to overcome many limitations of Nagios and provides a more powerful
and user-friendly network monitoring environment..