Icinga vs. XEOX

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general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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

XEOX is very well suited for scenarios where a high level of customization is needed. No other tool we have tested can be tailored so exactly to one's needs. It is possible to automize basically anything using custom scripts and the monitoring and health state of the devices is completely customizable, individually for every device.

However, this reflects in the complex interface which is quite overwhelming at first sight. Therefore, I highly recommend contacting the support team to get an introduction into their product. They offer one-to-one meetings for free and make the first steps a lot more easier!

• 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

• It has a health state for our devices which is completely customizable per device. So we can see on first sight whether there are some issues which are relevant for us.
• It is possible to run arbitrary powershell scripts which makes it even possible to automize tasks which are not supported natively by XEOX.
• The Windows patching is highly customizable: Even complex patch plans with multiple device groups which are patched at different times can be implemented.
• The support is excellent. The response time is typically within hours on working days. They have also implemented some of our features requests. Everything is included in the licence.

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

Incentivized

• At first sight, the interface is quite complex and it requires some time to get used to it.
• There is no ticketing system included.
• The documentation is partly outdated and incomplete.

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

The support answers withing hours (sometimes even minutes) on working days. One can also arrange a one-to-one meeting with them to go over specific needs. They even advised me on creating a good patch plan and shared their knowledge of patch management with me. Everything without any additional costs besides the standard licenses.

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

• 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