Icinga, I'll be seein' ya.
Updated April 07, 2017

Icinga, I'll be seein' ya.

Gabriel Ortiz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Icinga

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.
  • Hard to argue with free, Icinga was useful when the business was more resource-constrained
  • It was difficult to move away from Icinga because we had a lot of custom checks already written
While Icinga holds its own against old stalwarts like Nagios and Zabbix, it simply can't compete with the new generation of SaaS service/server monitoring software in terms of ease of use, feature-completeness, integration with things like Cloudwatch, CloudHealth, New Relic, etc. Most vendors also provide ready to run integrations with your configuration management software of choice which is a huge timesaver.
Datadog, Ansible, Chef, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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.

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