Icinga vs. Splunk IT Essentials

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

Splunk IT Essentials scales really well and is quite suitable for large enterprise environments which is where I use it. It can easily handle the classification and ingest of metrics/log data from thousands of devices. It also allows for easy grouping of these devices so that users can search just for Windows devices, or just for Linux machines. Provides a great overview of enterprise health while allowing deeper dives into the device level of data.

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

• Real time enterprise health monitoring
• Metrics ingest, parsing, and visualization
• Investigating and troubleshooting problems that arise with devices

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

• Currently need to special request this app on Splunk Cloud
• Not compatible with older versions of Splunk

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

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

If you've used any Splunk product then you know they have a good reputation for creating smart and user-friendly tools. Splunk IT Essentials is no different and I have had nothing but positive experiences with it. It was a straightforward integration with our enterprise environment. And it can also be leverage, as we did, when moving to ITSI as well.

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

• Huge time saver in troubleshooting issues in the environment
• Alerts allow for much quicker response time to certain events that require attention
• Able to leverage this app when transitioning to ITSI

Incentivized