Icinga vs. Power Admin PA Server Monitor

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

Power Admin PA Server Monitor works great for our needs. We do however wish that it worked for Linux Operating Systems.

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

• Alerts us when a server, storage device, or network device goes offline.
• Alerts us when a critical service running on a server stops running.
• Alerts us if files change, are removed, or are created.
• Alerts us if an unauthorized file type has been created on a monitored system
• Generate up-time reports for Executives.

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

• It does have bulk settings tools to set up bulk settings for multiple devices, but to me it could be a bit easier to use. However, I ran into a snag and reached out to support and they are great.
• It does not support Linux Operating Systems.

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

Excellent product, easy to use, many features, and fast/excellent support.

Incentivized

It is an excellent product that is much easier to use than many other open source type offerings. Easy learning curve.

Incentivized

Very fast, knowledgeable, and helpful support.

Incentivized

Overall it is an easy install and setup and their support is very fast and helpful

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

We tried some open source solutions. But, they were much more difficult to set up and maintain. PA is easy to use "out of the box". We looked at other paid solutions also, but they were cost prohibitive, since we are a small institution.

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

• It has decreased our critical services downtime, because we are able to VPN in and fix issues as soon as Power Admin alerts us of an issue. ROI has been excellent.
• It allows us to catch issues before they become critical by alerting us on errors that show up in our Event Logs.

Incentivized