Icinga vs. NetApp Cloud Insights

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general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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

For example, we had an application slowdown. It looked like the slowdown was storage. However, it was a malformed SQL query that no one realized was pulling data from the storage location that also housed the application. Cloud Insights saved us hours of downtime and frustration. Cloud Insights pinpointed which system was hogging resources. What makes Cloud Insights special is the way it looks at the data collected from the data sources. The insights it provides into the flow of data; sheds new light on how things work in your environment.

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.

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• Cloud service is the best part
• Alerts about any abnormal activity on the system before it's too late
• Track usage across all applications, units, etc.

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

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• Need to add more cloud resources for optimization, as many are still not compatible
• Data retention time is limited.
• Premium subscription is costly.

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.

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I have been extremely happy with its usability. You can take thins as they are out of the box and it is useful. You can carry it as far as you want to go and every step you take improves your ROI.

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Before using Cloud Insights, we quickly resolved all the issues we had by talking with the support team. The support team is eager to assist and technically well equipped. They quickly understood what we needed and helped us during the setup and the first use period so that we could adapt easily.

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

Cloud Insights allows us to create custom dashboards to monitor and trend any aspect of their infrastructure including CPU, memory, storage network utilization, IOPS, capacity utilization and more. Cloud Insights also provides visibility into the inter-connectivity of the components in our infrastructure by providing topology views of any component.

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

• Highly positiveROI in terms of resource optimization and cost cutting on IT services.
• Efficiently identify areas of wastes and make IT operations cost effective.

Incentivized