Icinga vs. Nagios Core vs. Qualys VMDR

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

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.

Incentivized

Qualys VMDR is best suited for larger companies with a very large IT asset footprint. Qualys VMDR is not suited for businesses that are small and upcoming as the price for the tool is very expensive and could be a budget sink if not used properly. In our organization we use the Qualys VMDR dashboard and reporting in order to collect any vulnerabilities we miss during our routine audits to ensure that our environment is stable and protected for attacks.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Seamless reporting across the different widgets (i.e. TruRisk)
• DEEP-DIVE into an asset's info/vulns
• Baked-in PCI ASV scans that a Qualys QSA can approve

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Qualys VMDR can definitely improve on its reporting of assets as we have caught devices not captured in the Qualys VMDR scans.
• We would like to see an improvement on the dashboard interface as it is faulty sometimes.
• Qualys VMDR should focus on more competitive pricing as it is very expensive.

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

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.

Incentivized

Next to Veeam (which is a tremendous product for backup/DR) this is the best service/software I have used in the past three decades. Should be called the Swiss Army Knife of security.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

infrastructure to identify vulnerabilities

Always available with the exception on maint windows

Incentivized

Once in a while it would be slow -

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

This is iron but I am giving it 5 star and I can give more If I can do because they are best in support. So once you own this product they will assign a dedicated support for you and when you are under the weather with anything just connect them with anything call, ping or ticket they will come like Genie.

Not really - the integrations via connectors is not heavy lifting. Any complexity has to do with a service that requires more steps (i.e. AWS/GCP)

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

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].

It is a very similar tool but Qualys VMDR is much better when it comes to reporting and solutions provided. Asset management is really good in Qualys VMDR. Qualys VMDR support is really quick , you can get a TPM if you run into any issues. Qualys VMDR has wide variety of scanning options which lacks in tenable.

Incentivized

MOSTLY good - but as noted having all features purchased on portal only - nothing that is not purchased.

Incentivized

Outside some pretty arcane apps or OS this is painless. The problem - and self-inflicted - is that older stuff is not supported.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Cut down on manual efforts to investigate or remediate vulnerabilities, which can be a big driver of ROI
• Avoidance of potential incidents with upfront risk mitigation
• Patching efficiency gains

Incentivized