Cisco UCS Manager vs Icinga

Likelihood to Recommend

It [Cisco UCS Manager] is extremely well suited to large virtual infrastructure environments with resource dense blades. This solution is also great if you want to consolidate a large number of servers (if they are servers that need to stay physical, but can fit in the profile of a blade) - this would reduce data center space utilization as well as power and cooling. Cisco UCS Manager is also great if you're looking for centralized management of a larger number of servers. This would not be a great solution if you have a very small shop - it's not cheap and probably wouldn't give you a ROI if you only have a couple dozen servers total. I'd say it would be overkill for small shops, but if you have the money and don't care, you'll still like it.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 5001-10,000 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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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Financial Services Company, 11-50 employees

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Pros

It is very all inclusive for management of every part our our Cisco blade center.
It allows us to directly connect to a hardware-based server in the blade center as though we were physically at the console.
It allows us to monitor the entire system for faults.
It lets us manage connectivity.
It is set to alert us via email if a fault occurs.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education 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

Automation: There is a simple power-shell CMD lets, but it leaves more to be desired.
Navigation: Navigating the interface can be confusing.
Integration: Integration with ESXi hosts while doing FW upgrades would be hugely beneficial without the need for additional tools.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Banking Company, 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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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

Starting Price

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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

Starting Price

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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

I think UCS Manager would be able very comparable to other vendors offerings when it comes to server configuration. I think Cisco did a good job in giving you full access to many options that you might not see with Dell or HPE. Every manufacturer would need a similar tool to control their server environment, but I think what Cisco has built into their Manager is a little better than others I've used. You can just see and change so many settings. I would say that is also a bit of a negative by a little bit because sometimes it is hard to dig in and find what you need to change and often might need to reach out to TAC or take a training course to understand all of the interface.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Mining & Metals Company, 501-1000 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

The positive is I was able to consolidate my small server infrastructure from 3 racks to one rack giving me space back and much power savings
The negative would be it could feel a little daunting to manage as there are many tabs and pieces to the interface.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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

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Matthew Goodhall

infastructure consultant

Vetasi LimitedInformation Technology & Services, 51-200 employees

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Cisco UCS Manager vs Icinga