Cisco UCS Manager vs Icinga

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a data center and use the Cisco UCS Blade platform with SAN storage, then UCS manager is the right tool for you. Managing one or a few host servers with UCS manager is pretty easy. You can see pretty quick what is going on with your servers. If you need to configure the fabric interconnects, you pretty much need to use UCS manager to do it. I find that it meets the needs for almost everything we do with the UCS C and B servers. If you have hyper flex servers from Cisco, then you would not want to use UCS manger. If you are not using Cisco servers you may not be able to use UCS manager.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Mining & Metals Company, 501-1000 employees

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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.

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Jason Frisvold

Founder, Head of DevOps (Formerly Riot Control Systems)

Noble MarketsFinancial Services, 11-50 employees

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Pros

Service Templates: Provision new hardware using templates in the matter of minutes.
Firmware updates: Modifying the FW level on a template will kick off an FW upgrade on all attached equipment.
Consolidated Views: See all equipment in a single view.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Banking Company, 201-500 employees

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

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Gabriel Ortiz

Senior Infrastructure Engineer

AgariComputer & Network Security, 51-200 employees

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Cons

UCSM is known for its bugs, especially during code upgrades.
Similar options can be set in a variety of places with varying effects.

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Tom Erdman

Network Systems Administrator

Johnson County LibraryLibraries, 201-500 employees

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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.

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Jamin Becker

System Administrator

SPX FLOW, Inc.Financial Services, 51-200 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Icinga 9.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Jamin Becker

System Administrator

SPX FLOW, Inc.Financial Services, 51-200 employees

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Support Rating

Cisco UCS Manager 9.0

Based on 4 answers

Cisco UCSM Support has been very quick to reply and address our concerns, issues, and questions. We have found that Cisco's documentation is clear and concise and fairly easy to find. With Cisco support's help, we are able to quickly and safely meet the demands of our end-users, consistently.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Education Management Company, 51-200 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

We were a IBM Blade Center shop. IBM was easier to manage. However, it was not as all inclusive. The IBM served us well, but when we started pricing out options Cisco came in a little less expensive on the current promotion they were running. The Cisco UCS has proven to be more stable and reliable, as well.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees

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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

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Internet Company, 201-500 employees

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Return on Investment

We were able to achieve a positive ROI on the system within 18 months. This might be unique to our situation. Priced against buying traditional servers and fabrics it would stack up favorably.
The ability to easily expand our infrastructure with blades is a strength. The profiles allow us to add a new server which is configured and deployed in a much shorter amount of time than traditional server infrastructure.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Information Services Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Icinga is free, but costs in initial setup manhours. This can be surprising, but it's still cheaper than other products.
The setup and maintenance requires a fairly adept sysadmin.

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No