Icinga vs. Nagios XI vs. Zabbix

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

If anyone looking for the monitoring system for the infrastructure this is the go-to tool which monitors all infrastructure related components from server health to Networking and update us with mails and can be easily integrated with multiple other tools as needed for example PagerDuty , Also this suits good both on premises and cloud environments as well. If we are managing complex environment this tool for monitoring is best one.

Incentivized

Zabbix is great for monitoring your servers and seeing alerts when the system uses too much CPU or memory. This allowed the system Engineer to be proactive and add resources to these systems to avoid interrupting the services. Especially servers running operations applications and services. This is one of the best usages for Zabbix.

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

• Network monitoring.
• Database monitoring.
• Windows Server monitoring.
• Cluster Service monitoring.

Incentivized

• Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
• Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
• Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
• Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
• Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.

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

• Robust, but visually old interface. Requires a lot of work to become presentable.
• Small selection of dashlets to construct new views.
• No MS Azure monitoring ability, nothing for “as service,” very limited Amazon cloud monitoring abilities.
• Questionable price politics (could make it a lot less for developing markets to actually increase use of the product and R&D budgets).
• No report designers nor the ability to create new reports. No changes in this area for years.
• Overall lack of new developments, making this product more and more outdated.

Incentivized

• Creating an alert & its trigger can be made easier.
• More VM-based data collection counters should be introduced to have better VM monitoring.
• The raw counters collection agent in every node is relatively weak. It goes down often, which needs more stability.

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

This tool has been has been of great use and learning , offering exceptional ease of use, scalability, and detailed reporting. It has a lot of customization options and proactive monitoring which have significantly improved our infrastructure management.It's UI & functions are good. Also has built in templates for various end points.It also provides graphical reports. With a Dashboard you can monitor easily

Incentivized

It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.

Incentivized

We
are using Nagios XI in our organization primarily for monitoring all our
application servers and databases, this is helping us in addressing all the
infrastructure issues in advance by alerting us when it any server hits the
threshold as per the initial parameter setup also it has free tier which helps for small scale applications monitoring to save some expenses.

Incentivized

I think every organization, especially the IT department, needs a tool like this. I know of another product like Zabbix that gives a similar or the same solution, but its range makes it very useful. You can see almost all the device info in one place: disk usage, disk space, network usage, etc.

Incentivized

Never seen any such outages with Nagios XI till day it was available all the time working as expected

Incentivized

Performance wise it does its best job we monitor more than 500 Servers and we use this tool for Analysis also so never felt any lag

Incentivized

Nagios XI support has plans to offer the following features:

• Access to knowledgeable IT professionals – including support staff and developers.
• Access to customer-only tutorials, documentation, and content in the Nagios Library.
• Access to customer-only boards on our support forum for expedited assistance.
• Access to customer-only email support for fast, confidential assistance.
• Discounts on future license purchases.

Incentivized

The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.

Incentivized

I have been participated in the few implementations, and I would say its bit complex when its come to initial setup once its set post that its easy to manage

Incentivized

We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.

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

Cost efficiency is the main reason which we opted [for] Nagios as we were previously using IDERA tool with comprehensive database monitoring solutions, but the slow performance we are getting while monitoring the instance of the database.

Incentivized

We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.

Incentivized

We have installed Nagios XI for our monitoring system and with this we are managing around 600 servers in total and not seen any major issues with its scalability we can scale it as much as we require and also installed on various applications servers and working as expected

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

• Very good ROI.
• Good results as capacity mgmt tool.
• Good results as application monitoring tool.

Incentivized

• Good ROI when trying to get ahead of network related problems instead of waiting for users to complain
• Good ROI when doing upgrades or exploratory work on a neglected network
• Good ROI when showing usage trends to management showing higher actual usage versus what was thought to be happening