Icinga vs. NETSCOUT TruView

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general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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

As a application it stands for what it offers. One single box, one single price, and the rest is part of the experience of the IT Teams to get the most from a quite complete solution. Visual TruView has an amazing dashboard that can be customized to meet the needs of the business, and can get involved in the ITSM development insights to leverage SLA monitoring. It has a well sustainable discovery engine to get the specs of applications, servers and sites. If you're looking for a solution that can give you reporting advantages this is it, but you need to get yourself into this solution from day one to design a proper strategy for its deployment. For less complex companies I strongly recommend to find a solution that can take you to parallel result with less investment.

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

• The app monitoring gives you the details to set different filters and do a quick identification of the root cause of the problem.
• Remarkable ability to store details of performance to analyze baselining, run advance troubleshooting, error detection and catalog by trends.
• The ability to sync with a device/interface whether is physical or virtual gives me the standpoint to set analysis upon network traffic across LAN or WAN and also get the insight of Cloud segments, setting the triggers to find out where the behavior changes to non-production traffic.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Product features are sometimes overwhelming if the IT team is not used to this technology. For a small and mid-size company, the number of settings and work that is needed to implement the solution could be a long and exhausting process.
• A "lite" version of Visual TruView could help a lot to small sized environments looking to develop the solution.
• I would like to add some mitigation tools for simple/common problems that could be easily managed by a monitoring tool like Netscout TruView.

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

As mentioned before, our deployment success depended on their expertise. Recommendations and overall response from their support engineers was out of this world. We, as supporters ourselves, are very critical in regards to the response times and knowledge of support services representatives. Often they just want to resolve your ticket not caring about the result, or focus only on the performance review we could give them. That's a standard behavior in most overseas support centers. The TruView engineers and management cared about us, our needs, and how they delivered the help we needed.

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

All of them have outstanding performance. They deliver excellent insights and I think we would be able to work with any of them. However, Netscout goes beyond expectations in regards to support. TruView is able to give you very detailed and specific information that would help in the early detection of performance problems and hardware failures. However, without the appropriated guidance through the setup steps, It could take a lot of time to get the desired results. Their help is invaluable. The support team was there to hold our hands through all this set up to assure that we reached the monitoring level we expected from the tool. That is sometimes more important than features.

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

• Overall response time to a failure detection has greatly improved since we started using this tool.
• We were able to centralize our NOC in one building. Before that, we had older and obsolete monitoring tools that required highly skilled network technicians to test and monitor our network health.
• Preventive actions can be programmed in advance thanks to the product's early issue detection.
• It took more time that we expected to have the system up and running as we desired. It takes a lot of teamwork and it is very time-consuming.

Incentivized