Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
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Zabbix
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
While Icinga holds its own against old stalwarts like Nagios and Zabbix, it simply can't compete with the new generation of SaaS service/server monitoring software in terms of ease of use, feature-completeness, integration with things like Cloudwatch, CloudHealth, New Relic, …
Icinga was initially a fork of Nagios. Over time, the configuration language was replaced with something more programmatic. This configuration language is one of the big sellers of this product. It allows flexible, quick configuration of large sets of hosts and services with …
The best of commercial products is nearly as good at cross platform monitoring as Icinga, and all of them are expensive.
Zabbix
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Zabbix
Zabbix had the best support for the devices I initially had in my network, its ability to adapt and change has made it my Swiss Army knife of monitoring tools. While it could benefit greatly from a moderated zabbix community, its support from the open source community has …
GIT is good to be used for faster and high availability operations during code release cycle. Git provides a complete replica of the repository on the developer's local system which is why every developer will have complete repository available for quick access on his system and they can merge the specific branches that they have worked on back to the centralized repository. The limitations with GIT are seen when checking in large files.
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.
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.
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.
Git has met all standards for a source control tool and even exceeded those standards. Git is so integrated with our work that I can't imagine a day without it.
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.
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.
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.
I am not sure what the official Git support channels are like as I have never needed to use any official support. Because Git is so popular among all developers now, it is pretty easy to find the answer to almost any Git question with a quick Google search. I've never had trouble finding what I'm looking for.
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.
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.
I've used both Apache Subversion & Git over the years and have maintained my allegiance to Git. Git is not objectively better than Subversion. It's different. The key difference is that it is decentralized. With Subversion, you have a problem here: The SVN Repository may be in a location you can't reach (behind a VPN, intranet - etc), you cannot commit. If you want to make a copy of your code, you have to literally copy/paste it. With Git, you do not have this problem. Your local copy is a repository, and you can commit to it and get all benefits of source control. When you regain connectivity to the main repository, you can commit against it. Another thing for consideration is that Git tracks content rather than files. Branches are lightweight and merging is easy, and I mean really easy. It's distributed, basically every repository is a branch. It's much easier to develop concurrently and collaboratively than with Subversion, in my opinion. It also makes offline development possible. It doesn't impose any workflow, as seen on the above linked website, there are many workflows possible with Git. A Subversion-style workflow is easily mimicked.
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
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.
Git has saved our organization countless hours having to manually trace code to a breaking change or manage conflicting changes. It has no equal when it comes to scalability or manageability.
Git has allowed our engineering team to build code reviews into its workflow by preventing a developer from approving or merging in their own code; instead, all proposed changes are reviewed by another engineer to assess the impact of the code and whether or not it should be merged in first. This greatly reduces the likelihood of breaking changes getting into production.
Git has at times created some confusion among developers about what to do if they accidentally commit a change they decide later they want to roll back. There are multiple ways to address this problem and the best available option may not be obvious in all cases.
