HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) vs. Icinga

This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products

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

• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at scanning for devices and adding them for monitoring is almost effortless.
• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at detecting most HP hardware and integrating with local management software.

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

• I think some of the areas that HP Systems Insight Manager can improve is non HP hardware.
• This software also sometimes struggles handling larger environments.
• This software also has issues managing environments that aren't set up perfectly.

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

For basic functions it's very easy to set up and use. However, for more advanced functions it takes a lot of time to figure out its quirks

Incentivized

It's good for small organizations that use HP branded equipment

Incentivized

Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.

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

• Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
• This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
• I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.

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