Icinga vs. XEOX

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

XEOX is very well suited for scenarios where a high level of customization is needed. No other tool we have tested can be tailored so exactly to one's needs. It is possible to automize basically anything using custom scripts and the monitoring and health state of the devices is completely customizable, individually for every device.

However, this reflects in the complex interface which is quite overwhelming at first sight. Therefore, I highly recommend contacting the support team to get an introduction into their product. They offer one-to-one meetings for free and make the first steps a lot more easier!

• 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 has a health state for our devices which is completely customizable per device. So we can see on first sight whether there are some issues which are relevant for us.
• It is possible to run arbitrary powershell scripts which makes it even possible to automize tasks which are not supported natively by XEOX.
• The Windows patching is highly customizable: Even complex patch plans with multiple device groups which are patched at different times can be implemented.
• The support is excellent. The response time is typically within hours on working days. They have also implemented some of our features requests. Everything is included in the licence.

• 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

• At first sight, the interface is quite complex and it requires some time to get used to it.
• There is no ticketing system included.
• The documentation is partly outdated and incomplete.

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

The support answers withing hours (sometimes even minutes) on working days. One can also arrange a one-to-one meeting with them to go over specific needs. They even advised me on creating a good patch plan and shared their knowledge of patch management with me. Everything without any additional costs besides the standard licenses.

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

• 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