Icinga vs. Pulseway

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 you have to manage a large number of computers, especially spread over multiple clients or a large physical area. This is one of the main products that allows us to act as a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and actually manage our clients devices and not just react to issues as clients call them in. Clients really love the proactive approach it allows us to take.

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

• It monitors computers and notifies us of any issues with any computer.
• It allows remote control of computers, such as requesting a computer to reboot itself.
• It is very highly configurable to monitor exactly what we need to monitor. For example, on server, we can have it notify us any time the server is shutdown or rebooted. On the other hand, for a desktop computer, we don't have to be bothered with notifications when a user decides to reboot his computer.

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 would be nice if they increased their scope of supported third-party apps.
• It would be great if they would create an ios app for their ticket system.
• If they could possibly build in a location service for tracking devices, that would be helpful.
• If they had two-factor authentication, it would be nice.

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

Pulseway is very user friendly. The system is labeled in terms and grouped together by function so that anyone can understand and locate the functions that they need. We use this system to monitor a file server that we have that can have an unstable power supply. This allows us to easily see that the system is offline and get it back to operational with minimal downtime.

Incentivized

I haven't really needed much support for Pulseway, so I can't really say a whole lot about their support. Pulseway has been pretty much trouble-free for us. There are regular updates and new features. The updates never seem to break anything or cause problems. It just works.

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

Pulseway has the most features, the best looking app with the best design and better usability than any others we evaluated. We liked the uniformity of the app design across all platforms (Windows, Android, Apple) and the notifications displayed on each platform. The price was a major contributor to our selection of Pulseway compared to the competition.

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

• Problems can be dealt with more rapidly because I have access to systems from anywhere. I don't have to carry a computer with me nor do I have to find a location with potentially non-secure wifi to gain access to my systems.
• I can handle 99% of my system admin tasks using Pulseway and never have to touch a system or connect to the console.
• Pulseway gives so much control over a system that I don't need to spend extra money on other software to perform management tasks.

Incentivized