DX Spectrum vs. Icinga vs. Zabbix

As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

• Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
• Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version

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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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Zabbix is great for monitoring your servers and seeing alerts when the system uses too much CPU or memory. This allowed the system Engineer to be proactive and add resources to these systems to avoid interrupting the services. Especially servers running operations applications and services. This is one of the best usages for Zabbix.

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• Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
• Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
• Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
• Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

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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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• Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
• Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
• Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
• Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
• Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.

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• NOC
• Data Center/Telecom

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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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• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

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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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It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.

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I think every organization, especially the IT department, needs a tool like this. I know of another product like Zabbix that gives a similar or the same solution, but its range makes it very useful. You can see almost all the device info in one place: disk usage, disk space, network usage, etc.

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The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.

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We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.

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Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.

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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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We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.

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• Proactive monitoring for networking
• To many times to plan an update

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• 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.

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• Good ROI when trying to get ahead of network related problems instead of waiting for users to complain
• Good ROI when doing upgrades or exploratory work on a neglected network
• Good ROI when showing usage trends to management showing higher actual usage versus what was thought to be happening