Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
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Nagios Core
Score 7.9 out of 10
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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.
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pfSense
Score 8.6 out of 10
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pfSense is a firewall and load management product available through the open source pfSense Community Edition, as well as a the licensed edition, pfSense Plus (formerly known as pfSense Enterprise). The solution provides combined firewall, VPN, and router functionality, and can be deployed through the cloud (AWS or Azure), or on-premises with a Netgate appliance. It as scalable capacities, with functionality for SMBs. As a firewall, pfSense offers Stateful packet inspection, concurrent…
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 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.
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.
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.
I believe PFSense is well suited for both home lab environments as well as up to small to mid-size business environments on a tight budget. However, I would implore that anything in production requires the use of the authorized hardware that PFSense sells to receive support. However, in my experience, PFSense is a solid set-and-forget firewall solution.
Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.
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.
I did kind of mention a Con in the Pro section with OpenVPN.
When I create a config for an employee other employees are able to login to that config.
I could be doing something wrong when I am making it - I am not afraid to admit that as I am pretty new to all of this, but it seems like it builds a key and I would think the key would be unique in some way to each employee, but I could be wrong.
I actually do not have a lot of Con's for this software - I did not get to set this up on our work network so I am not sure of any downfalls when installing.
I installed this on my personal machine in a Hyper-V environment to get a feel for it before I started working on it at work and it seemed pretty smooth. I didn't run into any issues.
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.
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.
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.
The pfSense UI is easy to navigate and pretty go look at. It is much better than some high dollar firewalls that just throw menus you you. The pfSense UI is quick and responsive and makes sense 99% of the time. Changes are committed quickly and the hardware rarely requires a reboot. It just runs.
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.
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
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].
Meraki has a unified management login for all devices, which is nice. It also has decent content filtering, both areas where pfSense is weaker. Where pfSense far ouclasses Meraki is in the ease of use and the other width of features. These include features such as better VPN interoperability, non-subscription based pricing, auditability, not relying on the infrastructure of a third party, more transparency of what's actually going on, easier to deploy replacements if hardware fails. Additionally, the NAT management for pfSense seems to be a bit better, as you can NAT between any network segment and not just the LAN segments out the WAN interfaces.
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.
pfSense can be installed on commodity hardware with no licensing fees. With a simple less than 10 minute restore time, on most hardware, it's an extremely inexpensive way to achieve the same results that some of the more expensive vendors provide.
The easy to use interface has allowed configuration management to be preformed by lower level technicians with quick and easy training.
