CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. Icinga vs. Prometheus

It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.

Incentivized

Icinga is a world-class monitoring system. It can be used for most general monitoring situations. It is not a silver bullet, however, and there are instances where domain-specific monitoring systems are necessary. However, the output from those monitoring systems can be funneled into Icinga as a central monitoring and alerting system.

Incentivized

This program works from the roots of the problem and creates a professional matrix for each of its users. This will give them more skills and resources to carry out tasks and reduce the difficulties of operating each of the processes of my work, as well as being An ally for the manipulation and operability of all your master data; Prometheus is very easy to recommend since it is a program that fulfills its mission.

Incentivized

• ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
• Change orders.
• Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Looking at metrics such as the aggregate number of HTTP requests served.
• Understanding how our services are performing in aggregate.
• Easy to deploy within a variety of architectures/environments.
• Open source so new features are added regularly and bugs are fixed in a timely manner.
• Free so there are no licensing restrictions.
• Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Incentivized

• The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
• It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
• It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Customer Service: since this is an open-source tool, customer service is not that great. Generally, you get all answers to your problems in online forums, but in case you got stuck, nobody will assist you in a channelised manner. You will have to find the way out on your own, and it may become frustrating at times.
• More metrics for dashboards shall be added per the application being monitored. Standards metrics will work in most cases but may not in specific applications. Therefore, customised metrics shall be created for some of the industry-standard niche applications.

Incentivized

Icinga is a solid solution which does everything it promises. It is backwards compatible with most Nagios instances, making the transition very easy. Once you get the hang of installing new plugins and editing configuration files expanding its monitoring capabilities are easy.

Incentivized

It is usable and one can learn if few people in the team are already using it. It can be difficult to understand at the beginning because of non intuitive UI and syntax of the rules. So, I've gone for 7 points as there is some room for improvement in user interface and rules syntax.

Incentivized

We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.

Incentivized

Never had to reach out to them.

Incentivized

I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.

Incentivized

Icinga is better than Nagios because of its nicer user interface. New Relic can monitor CPU/memory and disk usage, but it's more of a performance and application troubleshooting tool rather than monitoring

Incentivized

Highly customized pricing plans to choose from. Lower pricing for the same features compared to competitors. Easy to reach the support team, which provided detailed documentation and helped set up the Prometheus. Monitoring metrics gets very easy after the integration with Grafana. It also has a sophisticated alert setting mechanism to ensure we don't miss anything critical.

Incentivized

• It helped make us an ITIL shop.
• It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
• Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We are still working on the ROI
• The ROI mentioned during the purchase has not been achieved, however this could be due to lack of data from our side. 2 years of implementation is too early to calculate and confirm the ROI.

Incentivized