Freshping (discontinued) vs. Icinga

Freshping is suitable for anyone looking for a service to monitor the status of applications without much trouble and effort on it. The free tier will sure be enough for a lot of users. I wouldn't recommend this if you need very customized checks to define being up or down of course, or a very custom status page.

Incentivized

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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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

Incentivized

• The UI is neat. It's very easy to use, and with lots of information.
• It's very easy to set up.
• The "badge" feature is interesting for showing up on institutional website.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Better integration with Freshservice to generate tickets
• Monitor internal systems
• Better ability to customize

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

It's perfectly easy and straightforward to use. There's no need to read documentation, you just register and will surely be able to configure whatever monitor you want to set up. It's also very easy to use other features like the status page, reporting, alerts, etc.

Incentivized

To date we have had no need of support from Freshping, it has just been that easy to use. It is highly intuitive and self-explanatory.

Incentivized

We did not choose Freshping over these, we selected it as an additional tool in our toolset. It is important to have multiple angles of monitoring, and FreshPing was a natural addition because of its integration with our existing trouble ticketing solution and it being completely free to use. Compared to PRTG, it is much easier to create a systems status/uptime page for the end users to view.

Incentivized

Icinga was initially a fork of Nagios. Over time, the configuration language was replaced with something more programmatic. This configuration language is one of the big sellers of this product. It allows flexible, quick configuration of large sets of hosts and services with minimal input. Comparing it to other products like WhatsUp Gold, Zenoss, Zabbix, etc., it stands out as incredibly flexible. Adding additional features to Icinga can be as simple as searching for them online. And if they don't yet exist, there is a full API available for custom extensions.

Incentivized

• Good visual for end users
• Adds another check to verify uptime/outages
• Cost for us was free, so we had nothing to lose by adding it

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