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Icinga

Score8.9 out of 10

22 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Icinga?

Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Icinga.
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Icinga a free monitoring solution

Incentivized
Andre Zielinski
IT-Administrator in Information Technology at g.on experience gmbh (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga is used to monitor our internal systems and applications, so that we are detectings outages before the user does. It is also used to monitor out applications, which are in use on customer site.

Pros

  • Monitoring of applications and systems
  • Easy to provide additional plugins or write them yourself
  • Big community with many plugins
  • You can also use plugins for nagios as both share the same code base
  • Eays upgrade via Package Management

Cons

  • Configuration is a bit tricky to get into
  • Sometimes after an upgrade agents lose the connection to the main host
  • To use graphs you have to use another component. It is not integrated.

Return on Investment

  • With one check you know which applications are faulty e.g. after an upgrade. Which is big time saver
  • You easily detect outages ion the applications so that your customer ideally does not even realize there was an outage.
  • Detect if the environment does deliver the same result as in the same time as before to detect shortages.
  • Additional information when debugging. Saved us several hours where we could simply point to a database which was slow.

Alternatives Considered

PRTG Network Monitor and Nagios Core

Other Software Used

Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, Docker

Honest small business review

Incentivized
Matthew GoodhallView profile
infastructure consultant in Information Technology at Vetasi Limited (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Incident dashboard
  • Business processing
  • Stats

Cons

  • Decluttering - the dashboard seems to get very overwhelming
  • Segregation - would be helpful to split environments or clients into different areas
  • Alerting

Most Important Features

  • Centralised dashboard
  • Issue tracking
  • Reporting

Return on Investment

  • Proactive responses to issues before they happen
  • Reporting of all systems and being able to check against SLAs
  • Manageability of incidents

Alternatives Considered

Checkmk, Dynatrace, Nagios Core and Datadog

Other Software Used

Untangle NG Firewall, pfSense, HAProxy, Cloudflare

Icinga, I'll be seein' ya.

Incentivized
Gabriel OrtizView profile
Senior Infrastructure Engineer in Engineering at Agari (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Wealth of community-developed plugins.
  • Stable codebase.
  • Icinga 2 supports distributed monitoring.
  • Very performant, can support tens of thousands of checks per server.

Cons

  • Difficult, arcane configuration.
  • Very difficult to integrate into modern configuration management systems.
  • Hard to fit concepts like auto-scaling groups of ephemeral servers into Icinga's aging conception of servers as static entities.

Return on Investment

  • Hard to argue with free, Icinga was useful when the business was more resource-constrained
  • It was difficult to move away from Icinga because we had a lot of custom checks already written

Alternatives Considered

Datadog, Nagios, New Relic APM, Sensu, Zabbix and Prometheus

Other Software Used

Datadog, Ansible, Chef, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Icinga: The monitoring tool you've been missing

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Flexible: Monitoring is done via scripts. If you can write a script to return a go/no go response for something you want monitored, then you can monitor it.
  • Client/Server Model: The client/server model allows for secure communications between systems. Additionally, it allows data to continue to be collected in the event of a communication problem, queuing the data for upload when communication is restored.
  • Simple, but powerful, configuration: The configuration language used by Icinga allows additional flexibility without having to directly specify every relation. That is, you can use commands to apply a given configuration to hosts and services based on common properties.

Cons

  • Distributed configurations can be somewhat challenging to deploy. However, once set up, a multiple master setup can result in a highly available, resilient monitoring system.
  • Icinga supports a centralized configuration system akin to something like svn or git. Understanding how this works and using it in practice can be something of a challenge for beginners.

Return on Investment

  • Free - Icinga is free, open-source software. There are companies that can provide support if needed. But having a full-featured product such as this with no initial capex or continual opex cost is a definite plus.
  • Relatively simple to set up a single instance. This allows one to get up and running quickly and learn the system. As you learn, you can transform the system into a more complex, resilient system.

Alternatives Considered

Nagios, WhatsUp Gold, Zenoss Cloud and Zabbix

Other Software Used

Zoom, Expensify, Microsoft Office 365

Icinga is the new Nagios

Incentivized
Jamin BeckerView profile
System Administrator in Information Technology at SPX FLOW, Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Excellent monitoring solution, once you understand the configuration language adding additional hosts and services is easy.
  • Scalable and highly configurable.
  • Beautiful web UI.
  • Very very nice API.

Cons

  • High learning curve, setting up Icinga from scratch can be a bit of a challenge starting out.
  • If the io2db process fails you UI stops updating, which can be very frustrating.
  • There is no simple mechanism for adding new hosts and services through the web UI, it's all very config-file based.

Return on Investment

  • Provided us with 24/7 monitoring of critical assets.
  • A modified "executive view" gave managers and directors peace-of-mind that critical assets were functioning properly.

Other Software Used

FireEye, Eclipse Luna