Icinga vs. TrueSight Operations Management (discontinued)

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general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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

I'm using Entuity, and using BMC Operations Management to manage events is a must. Assign, acknowledging, close events, send notifications, and use REST API for external/internal connectors is a big plus! However, I'll not recommend it for small companies, due to the infrastructure and the huge amount of features it has.

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

• Real-time high-resolution metric monitoring. Data can be collected and viewed at 1-second resolution.
• Visualization of line charts
• Cloud hosted

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Hardware monitoring built in as a standard feature of TrueSight Operations Management rather than a separately bought product

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

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

We have done extensive comparisons between the products and some where quickly eliminated for lacking functionality or support for key technologies. The features that really pushed TrueSight to the top over other full suites from CA, ScienceLogic, SolarWinds, HP, Foglight and IBM was a mix of deal-breaking gaps for us in areas including support of iSeries, QoS reporting, integration options to other platforms and advanced analytics with event management

• 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

• Positive in alert notifications.
• Positive in keeping environment up time.
• Positive in being able to monitor various metrics and meters.

Incentivized