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Icinga is the new Nagios
Updated February 27, 2016

Icinga is the new Nagios

Jamin Becker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Icinga

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Provided us with 24/7 monitoring of critical assets.
  • A modified "executive view" gave managers and directors peace-of-mind that critical assets were functioning properly.
There are two main competitors of Icinga in my opinion, Nagios, and NetFlow based monitoring solutions. Both are good, Icinga, is a more refined version of Nagios with a much better API and backwards compatibility to the platform. If you are running Nagios, you can transfer most of your configuration files to Icinga and they will run without a hitch. NetFlow solutions typically are provide a simpler UI for adding new hosts and the services you are trying to monitor.
FireEye, Eclipse Luna
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.

Using Icinga

10 - System Administrators, IT Director
2 - Icinga requires a moderate level of experience in Linux and having a basic knowledge of the LAMP stack is very useful. Deployment often takes some tweaking with configuration files, and knowing how to use Linux based text editors such as VIM and NANO is very helpful. Finally setting up Icinga occasionally requires modifying permissions of files, a knowledge of chmod, useradd, and groupadd is very helpful.
  • Critical Asset Monitoring
  • Device status via SNMP and SNMP Traps
  • Uptime/Downtime metrics
  • Developed an Icinga plugin to monitor the temperature in the server room and notify us if it was above 70 degrees
  • Developed an Icinga plugin which essentially acted as an IDS, scanning Apache logs and notifying us of SQL injection attacks
  • We leveraged alerts in Icinga to notify stakeholders when a maintenance window was about to go into affect
  • We leveraged the API to open up helpdesk tickets when an asset went down.
  • Further integration with our helpdesk -- assign tickets to server administrators
  • Custom "executive dashboards" providing the status of various applications running on critical assets
  • Automated actions on downed assets -- Integrate with PoE to reboot devices which are down, and restart crashed daemons.
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.