Icinga vs. Vercara UltraWPM

Icinga is a world-class monitoring system. It can be used for most general monitoring situations. It is not a silver bullet, however, and there are instances where domain-specific monitoring systems are necessary. However, the output from those monitoring systems can be funneled into Icinga as a central monitoring and alerting system.

Incentivized

If you need to gauge whether your site is up or down, then Neustar will give you exactly what you are looking for. However, if you need more granularity for specific application or sub-systems and their functionality, this product will need to be subsidized with other applications that provide more data or information on how individual components or systems are working.

Incentivized

• Wealth of community-developed plugins.
• Stable codebase.
• Icinga 2 supports distributed monitoring.
• Very performant, can support tens of thousands of checks per server.

Incentivized

• It allows access to a history of checks, how much time they took, and if any errors were detected.
• It can alert several people, or many in a group, for information related to the application availability.
• When drilling down into the check, the logs can pinpoint the exact time and code events and how long each step took to respond.

Incentivized

• High learning curve, setting up Icinga from scratch can be a bit of a challenge starting out.
• If the io2db process fails you UI stops updating, which can be very frustrating.
• There is no simple mechanism for adding new hosts and services through the web UI, it's all very config-file based.

Incentivized

• The interface can be buggy.
• We have experienced false positives of a system outage that was not accurate.
• It's not a true measure of system performance or uptime, but simply judges up or down from a holistic view.

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

Icinga is better than Nagios because of its nicer user interface. New Relic can monitor CPU/memory and disk usage, but it's more of a performance and application troubleshooting tool rather than monitoring

Incentivized

To be honest, I am not certain why this product was initially chosen over other products. It was being used when I started working at a new job. I was trained on its use and focused on tracking issues when an alert was given. There are many products that can be used for monitoring site uptime. Neustar definitely has its uses for monitoring if a site is up or down, but its lack of granularity can turn some away.

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

• Our company at one time gauged overall system uptime using Neustar WebMetrics to provide this data
• Due to the limitations with the applications ability to show system functionality and uptime we have begun using other methods for determining system uptime for our customers.
• The interface can be a bit tricky to understand during first use. There is somewhat of a learning curve.

Incentivized