Icinga, I'll be seein' ya.
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.
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