Icinga vs. LogicMonitor vs. Nagios Core

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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The example I will give will explain my rating for it. One employee left our company due to a personal issue, and at that time, our team was working on a highly secure project. He wanted to take revenge on our company, so he began hacking our systems from the outside. Since it appears that someone without authorization is attempting to access our systems, LogicMonitor simultaneously alerted our team to the problem. We stopped that threat with LogicMonitor.

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Nagios monitoring is well suited for any mission critical application that requires per/second (or minute) monitoring. This would probably include even a shuttle launch. As Nagios was built around Linux, most (85%) plugins are Linux based, therefore its more suitable for a Linux environment.

As Nagios (and dependent components) requires complex configurations & compilations, an experienced Linux engineer would be needed to install all relevant components.

Any company that has hundreds (or thousands) of servers & services to monitor would require a stable monitoring solution like Nagios. I have seen Nagios used in extremely mediocre ways, but the core power lies when its fully configured with all remaining open-source components (i.e. MySQL, Grafana, NRDP etc). Nagios in the hands of an experienced Linux engineer can transform the organizations monitoring by taking preventative measures before a disaster strikes.

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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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• It shows us system issues right away so we can fix them fast.
• It finds new devices on its own, so we do not miss anything.
• It alerts us only when something really unusual happens.
• Its dashboards make it easy for everyone to see system health.
• It helps us see trends so we are ready for busy times.

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• Monitoring of services is one of the biggest benefits for our company. Being able to respond in a timely fashion keeps business smooth.
• Hardware and device monitoring are easy to set up with proper parameters.
• Notification to key staff to be able to respond quickly makes issues go away faster.

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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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• Segmentation at an instance level not just the resource when clients are sharing the same device but shouldn't see each other's relevant data
• ARM CPU support for collectors to allow for a lighter weight appliance deployment
• WMI collection with a Linux collector so a windows collector would not be needed or a virtual appliance template that can be used to deploy collectors

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• Nagios could use core improvements in HA, though, Nagios itself recommends monitoring itself with just another Nagios installation, which has worked fine for us. Given its stability, and this work-around, a minor need.
• Nagios could also use improvements, feature wise, to the web gui. There is a lot in Nagios XI which I felt were almost excluded intentionally from the core project. Given the core functionality, a minor need. We have moved admin facing alerts to appear as though they originate from a different service to make interacting with alerts more practical.

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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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This product has met virtually all of our needs. It was easy to implement and has been simple to support. Customization has been intuitive with many options available. They keep adding features and expanding available options. The future of LogicMonitor looks even better than it is today which is very promising. The management and support teams at LogicMonitor are always helpful

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We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.

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Set up is super easy. Just stand up a small Linux or Windows server to act as a collector. There are no agents to install on monitored devices and all you need is SNMP or WMI access. When creating dashboards, all you have to do is find the widget on the device you want to show up and choose the menu option to add it.

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The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.

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The sales team support we received was top notch. They worked hand in hand to make sure the product met all expectations. So far we have not really had to work with support that much; we have worked with setup team after purchase to deploy product fully. No issues so far and we are four weeks in.

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I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.

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Add good training

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The training is good but room to improve

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I did not truly dedicate myself to implementing LogicMonitor. However, I overheard the IT team members explain that "LogicMonitor is perfect for us as it has made most of the work automated, and implementation and training sessions were perfect for us." Thus, I can state that everything went smoothly with our implementation.

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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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Basically, we did not have any idea about it and how to choose, but we asked one of our former bosses, as they were very experienced with it, so they helped us by clarifying a few things between New Relic and LogicMonitor, as they told us that if you are looking for an automated option, then there is no better option than LogicMonitor.

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Because we get all we required in Nagios [Core] and for npm, we have to do lots of configuration as it is not as easy as Comair to Nagios [Core]. On npm UI, there is lots of data, so we are not able to track exact data for analysis, which is why we use Nagios [Core].

Pricing seems to be getting more and more aggressive, I worry that it's going to turn into ServiceNow or SAP and everything minor feature will be an extreme cost that prices out us and our customers

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Haven't really used it but our initial onboarding PS was disappointing. Felt like we were being told what we needed to cover as opposed to what we wanted to cover. In addition, we were pushed into using the PS in tight time frames and we were not ready to do so.

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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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• We Eliminated an on-prem monitoring tool which was in excess of 25 servers
• A decrease in time to response from our Network Operations Center resulted in a more consistent client experience
• Dynamic alert thresholds helped reduce alerting by about 10 to 15% as soon as we turned it on for volatile metrics like CPU and memory

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• With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
• You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.

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