Icinga vs. LiveAction

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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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 product is best suited for performing assessments on your network infrastructure via data and voice over IP flows. Finding bandwidth hogs is also easy to do with the product (Similar to Plixer's Scrutinizer product), and permits point-and-click remediation of Quality of Service (QOS), layer2/3 transit problems, and security issues.

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

• Packet tracing and diagnostics.
• The visual analytics in the dashboard were good.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Cost is VERY high for what this product does, but it's worth it if you do not have all of the expertise to prioritize your network properly

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

Can't really rate this, we never had to call support. The product wasn't complicated to setup and learn. We have a high level of network knowledge so the product was self-explanatory.

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

Compared to ExtraHop it lacked the network analytics that compares data from an L2 up. We were able to track down rogue devices. certificates, a DNS attack, etc. that would have been a little hard to do in LiveAction. On the flip side, compared to PRTG, LiveAction has many more features that PRTG is lacking. The reporting, actions and visual analytics alone were better.

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

• Real time insight to network issues whether security related or not.
• Great reporting features for executives.

Incentivized