Icinga Reviews & Insights

Score8.9 out of 10

22 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Icinga are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Configuration Language: Many users have found the configuration language of Icinga to be understandable and easy to grasp, making it simple to add additional hosts and services. This suggests that the configuration language is user-friendly and facilitates the setup process for reviewers.

Scalability and High Configurability: Reviewers appreciate the scalability and high configurability of Icinga, as it can accommodate growth and adapt to different monitoring needs effectively. This ensures that the system remains flexible and capable of meeting evolving requirements for a significant number of users.

Beautiful Web User Interface: The visually appealing web user interface of Icinga has been praised by reviewers, enhancing their overall experience with the platform. Its attractive design contributes to a positive user experience by providing an aesthetically pleasing environment for monitoring and managing systems.

Reviews

7 Reviews

Icinga a free monitoring solution

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 3, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga is used to monitor our internal systems and applications, so that we are detectings outages before the user does. It is also used to monitor out applications, which are in use on customer site.

Pros

Monitoring of applications and systems
Easy to provide additional plugins or write them yourself
Big community with many plugins
You can also use plugins for nagios as both share the same code base
Eays upgrade via Package Management

Cons

Configuration is a bit tricky to get into
Sometimes after an upgrade agents lose the connection to the main host
To use graphs you have to use another component. It is not integrated.

Likelihood to Recommend

Is is well suited for monitoring of applications and systems both internal and external. Due to the ease to add your own plugins you can monitor your applications as granular as you like.

If you want an easy to use monitoring suite and don't want to spend much time configuring it, PRTG would be a better solution. But if you want to configure many granular details I think Icinga is a good solution.

Andre Zielinski

IT-Administrator in Information Technology at g.on experience gmbh (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Honest small business review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 3, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga is used by the hosting and support teams. To give us a dashboard for any current incidents but also to show warnings for us to react before it can become a bigger problem. We also make use of services such as certificate monitoring

Pros

Incident dashboard
Business processing
Stats

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

When incorporated with other services as part of the monitoring stack Icinga is very helpful. Although on its own you will need to keep the dashboard open to get the alerts making it less helpful. Making use of other services such as opsgenie, elastic search, kibana and graphana to name a few.

Matthew Goodhall

infastructure consultant in Information Technology at Vetasi Limited (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Icinga is what you need, even if you don't want to admit it.

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 18, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga is our core monitoring platform for all non-Windows systems. However, our Windows group is actively looking to abandon their current platform and implement it for their systems as well.

Pros

The price tag is right. Monitoring systems are only as good as the time you put into them, so why start with a huge buy-in before dumping man hours in also?
Despite some older styled interfaces, the dashboard is easy to manage and understand.
Scalability is excellent.

Cons

Icinga is a monitoring solution only. It doesn't generate PHB graphs, but everyone seems to expect it to.
Configuration can be confusing and difficult. For non-unix people the learning curve is very intimidating.

Likelihood to Recommend

Icinga or its predecessor Nagios seems to be a tool every SysAdmin has had to work with. It's ruggedly simplistic, and utilitarian, but it works, and it's free. I wouldn't call it perfectly fitted to any one type of system, but it's better suited to more than any other system. It'll just work, and if it doesn't, you can make it work with the same difficulty of the initial setup.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Icinga: The monitoring tool you've been missing

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 30, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga is a world-class monitoring system. I've used this product for several companies, monitoring everything from typical server response to verification that specific daemons are up and running. The client/server nature of Icinga allows for monitoring of nearly anything you can write a script for. Installing the client on a server, you can monitor local CPU, memory, processes, etc. without the need for SNMP. Communication between client and server is TLS encrypted, adding security where typically there is none. We have used Icinga across the entire enterprise to monitor network and system devices.

Pros

Flexible: Monitoring is done via scripts. If you can write a script to return a go/no go response for something you want monitored, then you can monitor it.
Client/Server Model: The client/server model allows for secure communications between systems. Additionally, it allows data to continue to be collected in the event of a communication problem, queuing the data for upload when communication is restored.
Simple, but powerful, configuration: The configuration language used by Icinga allows additional flexibility without having to directly specify every relation. That is, you can use commands to apply a given configuration to hosts and services based on common properties.

Cons

Distributed configurations can be somewhat challenging to deploy. However, once set up, a multiple master setup can result in a highly available, resilient monitoring system.
Icinga supports a centralized configuration system akin to something like svn or git. Understanding how this works and using it in practice can be something of a challenge for beginners.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Icinga, I'll be seein' ya.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

June 13, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga was in place when I started, it continues to be used for a legacy environment. It monitors the status and availability of servers and services, previously for the entire production and quality assurance environments and now just for a legacy mail processing system. We chose to move away from Icinga about a year ago.

Pros

Wealth of community-developed plugins.
Stable codebase.
Icinga 2 supports distributed monitoring.
Very performant, can support tens of thousands of checks per server.

Cons

Difficult, arcane configuration.
Very difficult to integrate into modern configuration management systems.
Hard to fit concepts like auto-scaling groups of ephemeral servers into Icinga's aging conception of servers as static entities.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Gabriel Ortiz

Senior Infrastructure Engineer in Engineering at Agari (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Icinga is the new Nagios

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 11, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Like Nagios, we used Icinga as a network monitoring solution. It provided us with insights as to when a device was not functioning properly or failed completely. It was implemented throughout the entire organization, monitoring all our most critical assets.

Pros

Excellent monitoring solution, once you understand the configuration language adding additional hosts and services is easy.
Scalable and highly configurable.
Beautiful web UI.
Very very nice API.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anywhere you have critical assets to be monitored Icinga is a good option. In order to make the most use of it, it has to have someone dedicated to supporting it as there are no built-in "auto-discover" new hosts options.

Jamin Becker

System Administrator in Information Technology at SPX FLOW, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Icinga monitoring tools

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 4, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Icinga is one of our internal monitoring user interfaces. It's the front end to nagios basically. We incorporate it with our Pager-Duty service and will receive pages if critical services go down. Our technical operations team is the primary department that uses Icinga, however more and more of the engineering and development teams are getting logins as they will be given more responsibility in monitoring their deployed services.

Pros

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.

Cons

The user interface is good, but I had trouble with the customization of the front end.
Certain things can be copied and pasted. Certain things can't. I would like to see all things be able to be copied and pasted.

Likelihood to Recommend

Icinga is a good tool for monitoring all aspects of your infrastructure. Because Nagios/Icinga are very customizable, you can monitor anything. I wouldn't use this tool for time series data or trending. There aren't graphs or at least we haven't used the graphing features.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Icinga: The monitoring tool you've been missing

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 30, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Flexible: Monitoring is done via scripts. If you can write a script to return a go/no go response for something you want monitored, then you can monitor it.
Client/Server Model: The client/server model allows for secure communications between systems. Additionally, it allows data to continue to be collected in the event of a communication problem, queuing the data for upload when communication is restored.
Simple, but powerful, configuration: The configuration language used by Icinga allows additional flexibility without having to directly specify every relation. That is, you can use commands to apply a given configuration to hosts and services based on common properties.

Cons

Distributed configurations can be somewhat challenging to deploy. However, once set up, a multiple master setup can result in a highly available, resilient monitoring system.
Icinga supports a centralized configuration system akin to something like svn or git. Understanding how this works and using it in practice can be something of a challenge for beginners.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience