Icinga vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

If you're running bare-metal in a datacenter and your hosts are fairly static, it's probably okay to use something like Icinga to monitor your systems. In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems. There are a number of good SaaS monitoring solutions which are superior and several open source projects which implement an automation-centric approach to monitoring

Incentivized

It’s best for troubleshooting issues that require a packet level analysis. By having source/destination you can have a view into how the packets are traversing the network. If alerts/baselines are set up it can help identify something out of the norm. Very useful for VoIP applications as well. Would not recommend for small scale environments.

Incentivized

• I think Icinga has a great search feature. I can always search for the hosts, host groups, or check names. When using just regular Nagios, I don't recall being able to do this search.
• The fact that I can use Active Directory or LDAP for logins is a great feature.
• If you are familiar with Nagios, it's very simple to combine the two products to get a polished finished product.

Incentivized

• The graphical interface has to be the key benefit of NetScout. I am more of a packet analyzer but the interface gives the upper levels easier view into the network.
• The breakdown of sites is useful.
• The ability of the break the traffic down and go into the packet analyzer straight from the graphical interface. Saves a lot of time writing filters with just simple clicks.

Incentivized

• Decluttering - the dashboard seems to get very overwhelming
• Segregation - would be helpful to split environments or clients into different areas
• Alerting

Incentivized

• Better access to resources
• Pricing in this niche market is very high, hard for the little guy to take advantage of these solutions

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

It provides a lot of useful information, but it's not always easy/intuitive to find it. It really needs to get a fully functional API integrated to support automation and integration with other monitoring and analytics tools to enable faster decision making. On the other hand, it gathers a lot of useful information from complex networks that are useful for capacity management and faster incident isolation and resolution.

Incentivized

We have a dedicated OSE who has been very helpful. Besides that, we have little experience beyond this specific model

Incentivized

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 minimal input. Comparing it to other products like WhatsUp Gold, Zenoss, Zabbix, etc., it stands out as incredibly flexible. Adding additional features to Icinga can be as simple as searching for them online. And if they don't yet exist, there is a full API available for custom extensions.

Incentivized

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is the best solution which we have encountered so far. The best part about this is that it can be integrated with various third party tool for more visibility and behavior analysis. The dashboard is loaded with a lot of useful features which gives the complete trend analysis of connectivity loss and network flaps and helps to identify the critical sites which is not present in other technology solution. This is an incredible network performance monitoring tool

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

• NetScout nGeniusONE helps to reduce the time and effort (people to involve) to react on network outages, speed up the investigation progress, and much more quickly to identify the root cause.
• Proactive helps the operation team to identify the underline problems and help the business to take actions before the issue starts to impact the customer's business. Help to reduce the incidents and outages.
• Help the operation teams to better understand the performance and health of the network from a higher level and end to end perspective, improve the efficiency of work.

Incentivized