Grafana Loki vs. Icinga

Grafana Loki can compile data logs for easy exploration of a service and enable quick troubleshooting and error tracing for engineers who may not have deeper access. However, Loki is dependent on the service logging complexity, which, depending on the logger, may not be robust enough and limit the value offered.

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

• Access to many open-source dashboards, access to add many data-sources to gather and visualize data from.
• Grafana Loki does well gathering of logs from various data-sources, we can also filter the logs based on our needs.
• One stop solution for all the logs and monitoring.

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

• Learning curve is very steep
• Longer term log insight is a challenge
• Very easy on AWS, integration with other systems can be more of a challenge

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

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

Grafana Loki makes accessing and viewing service logs easy for engineers who may not be familiar with going into service. However, useability can be limited if engineers are unaware of what the queries should look like or where in the service to direct Loki to look for logging.

Incentivized

First and foremost if Grafana Loki is based on CNCF open source projects so organizations can get freedom to choice to configure it at your own other main thing is Grafana Loki is totally free of cost and we can deploy it on our infrastructure. On compared with other managed services like Datadog, New Relic it is very expensive and we also don't have much control on the tools we use.

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

• Company wide (realtime) insights in complex aws setup is great
• Dashboarding options are easily set up

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