Icinga vs. Nagios Core

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Icinga
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.N/A
Nagios Core
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.N/A
Pricing
IcingaNagios Core
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Single License
Free
Single License
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IcingaNagios Core
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IcingaNagios Core
Considered Both Products
Icinga
Chose Icinga
PRTG was the solution that was implemented before. As Icinga is Open Source we saved the licensing fee, as we ran out of free checks. I also had knowledge in Icinga so we switched over.

Nagios is inferior to Icinga in my opinion, as Icinga has the better Web UI, which I use the …
Chose Icinga
Installation and initial configuration is straight forward. However the system can grow in complexity very quickly, if not managed correctly.
Chose Icinga
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 …
Chose Icinga
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, …
Chose Icinga
There are two main competitors of Icinga in my opinion, Nagios, and NetFlow based monitoring solutions. Both are good, Icinga, is a more refined version of Nagios with a much better API and backwards compatibility to the platform. If you are running Nagios, you can transfer …
Chose Icinga
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.
Nagios Core
Chose Nagios Core
We selected Nagios because of the size of its community. We've used some of the others in the field over the past few years, Nagios had the best features out of the box coupled with it's following made it an easy selection.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
IcingaNagios Core
Small Businesses
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.4 out of 10
Auvik
Auvik
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IcingaNagios Core
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(7 ratings)
7.7
(42 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
4.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(9 ratings)
User Testimonials
IcingaNagios Core
Likelihood to Recommend
Icinga GmbH
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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Nagios Enterprises
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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Pros
Icinga GmbH
  • 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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Nagios Enterprises
  • 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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Cons
Icinga GmbH
  • 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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Nagios Enterprises
  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
Icinga GmbH
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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Nagios Enterprises
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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Usability
Icinga GmbH
No answers on this topic
Nagios Enterprises
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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Support Rating
Icinga GmbH
No answers on this topic
Nagios Enterprises
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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Alternatives Considered
Icinga GmbH
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
Read full review
Nagios Enterprises
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].
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Return on Investment
Icinga GmbH
  • 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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Nagios Enterprises
  • 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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ScreenShots