Nagios History

A brief history of Nagios is presented below.

1996

Ethan Galstad creates a simple MS-DOS application designed to "ping" Novell Netware servers and send numeric pages. The application is designed using external third-party applications to perform the server checks and send pages. The basic architectural concept that will be used for Nagios is born.

1998

Considering getting in to the hosted monitoring / managed services business, Ethan uses the ideas and architecture of his earlier work to begin building a new and improved application designed to run under Linux.

1999

Ethan releases his work as an Open Source project under the name "NetSaint". He estimates there might be approximately one dozen other people who might be interested in the application.

The plugins that were originally distributed as a part of the NetSaint distribution are soon spun off as a separate Nagios Plugins project.

2002

Due to trademark issues with the name "NetSaint" that could have a long term impact, Ethan decides to rename the project to "Nagios", which was a recursive acronym for "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood". The NetSaint Plugins project development is moved to the Nagios Plugins project.

2005

Nagios is SourceForge.net Project of the Month (POTM) in June.

2006

Nagios is rated by eWeek Labs as one of several enterprise-class "Must Have Tools".

Nagios is mentioned as one of the "Hot Companies in Open Source" to watch in Michal Moe's "Finding the Next Starbucks" - even though there isn't a company yet.

2007

Ethan founds Nagios Enterprises, LLC to provide consulting and development services around Nagios.

Nagios is a finalist in the "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins" category of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards.

Nagios wins the LinuxQuestions.org 2007 "Monitoring Application of the Year" aware.

LinuxWorld.com rates Nagios as one of the "Top 5 Open Source Security Tools in the Enterprise".

eWeek rates Nagios as one of "The Most Important Open Source Apps of All Time".

2008

Nagios makes the front cover of Information Week magazine titled "The Open Source Enterprise".

Nagios wins the LinuxQuestions.org 2008 "Monitoring Application of the Year" award for a second year in a row.

Nagios is honored as being one of Infoworld's Best of Open Source Software ("BOSSIE") 2008 Award winners. Nagios won the "Server Monitoring" category.

Nagios is downloaded directly from SourceForge.net over 500,000 times.

2009

Annual support contracts are officially offered for the first time from Nagios Enterprises.

Nagios Enterprises releases its first commercial monitoring product based on Nagios.

Nagios wins the Linux Journal Reader's Choice 2009 award for "Favorite Linux Monitoring Application".

Nagios is a finalist in the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2009 for "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins".

Infoworld names Nagios as one of the Best of Open Source Software ("BOSSIE") 2009 Award winners. This was the second year in a row that Nagios achieved such an honor.

Nagios is renamed Nagios Core.

Nagios Core is downloaded directly from SourceForge.net over 600,000 times.