Azure Monitor vs Icinga comparison

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Azure Monitor

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Icinga and Azure Monitor compete in the monitoring solutions category. Azure Monitor may have the upper hand due to its extensive features and cloud integration.

Features: Icinga offers customizable alerting, network services, and multiple automation features. Azure Monitor provides integrated analytics, real-time data surveillance, and application insights.

Room for Improvement: Icinga's complexity in setups can be enhanced, user interface could be more intuitive, and integration features can be broadened. Azure Monitor can improve its cost efficiency, enhance visual data representation, and expand non-Microsoft integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Icinga can be complex to set up but has community support. Azure Monitor benefits from seamless Azure integration and extensive documentation for smooth onboarding.

Pricing and ROI: Icinga is cost-effective with high ROI due to its open-source nature. Azure Monitor has higher usage-based costs, justifying its price for businesses focused on comprehensive cloud monitoring.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Monitor vs. Icinga Report (Updated: June 2025).

Azure Monitor vs. Icinga

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

3rd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (4th)

Icinga

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

18th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (17th), Server Monitoring (12th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (25th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 5.9%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 4.5%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Usman Khawar

Software Engineer (DevOps/ SRE) at Sensys LLC

Native integration simplifies monitoring but documentation and cost improvements are needed

The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features. The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently. They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature. Azure Monitor is stable and scalable. Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.

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Harrison Bulley

Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Net Consulting

A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification

I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The tools for logs and metrics are pretty good and easy to use."

"It allows you to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts."

"I find the query language in this tool very beneficial, as it allows me to customize some dashboards and create alerts according to my thresholds and metrics."

"The solution's most valuable features are its ease of use and support for multiple environments"

"It's a Microsoft native tool, so it works well with other Microsoft technologies, which is predominantly what our customer end-user base is."

"Technical support is helpful."

"One of the most useful aspects of this solution is the out-of-the-box functionality on all areas, especially on Application Insights, zero instrumentation, and artificial intelligence for event correlation."

"The tool's most valuable feature is the alert system, which can be set according to our metrics. The integration is smooth."

More Azure Monitor pros

"Icinga does the job and is fairly stable."

"There's a module called Icinga Director, which helps us configure the product using an intuitive interface through clicks instead of creating a text configuration. It's very helpful for us."

"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."

"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."

"The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first."

"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."

"An affordable solution for small organizations to do basic network monitoring."

"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."

More Icinga pros

Cons

"Setting up this solution is complex. It's also missing the functionality of assigning alerts."

"n comparison to New Relic, which I've used before, it's a bit more complicated. It's not as easy to use. It also took some time to get it working. The implementation needs to be simpler."

"The product should integrate well with other tools or clouds in the future, as it is one of the areas where the product currently has certain shortcomings."

"Lacks information including details related to where problems lie."

"There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier."

"The troubleshooting logs need improvement. There should be some improvement there. I have a hard time finding the right logs at the right times whenever there is an issue occurring."

"It's really complex to retrieve or query the logs in Azure Monitor."

"Currently, it seems it's complicated to get the correct information in terms of what to do and how things work."

More Azure Monitor cons

"There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved."

"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."

"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."

"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."

"Icinga’s automation could be improved."

"I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built."

"The installation and configuration are very complex."

"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."

More Icinga cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive, but it is worth the price."

"Customers of Azure Monitor must pay an amount that depends largely on how many services they need to integrate and the storage space required in terms of logs, etc. If they only have a few small services to monitor, the price won't be too high, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, it can certainly get pricey."

"I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability."

"The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website."

"The tool is expensive."

"Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads."

"The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts."

"The licensing is a monthly fee."

More Azure Monitor pricing and cost advice

"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."

"It's an open-source solution."

"This is an open-source solution with paid support."

"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."

"The solution is cheap."

"The solution is free to use."

"We're using the free version of Icinga."

"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?

Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...

What do you like most about Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.

What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?

The primary challenge is the documentation. The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that...

What do you like most about Icinga?

The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?

It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...

What needs improvement with Icinga?

There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...

Dynatrace vs Azure Monitor

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Product Reports

Azure Monitor

Download Azure Monitor product report

Download Icinga product report

Also Known As

No data available

Icinga Cloud Monitoring

Overview

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides a centralized platform for monitoring the performance and health of various Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure.

With Azure Monitor, users can gain insights into the availability, performance, and usage of their applications and infrastructure. The key features of Azure Monitor include metrics, logs, alerts, and dashboards. Metrics allow users to collect and analyze performance data from various Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts.

Logs enable users to collect and analyze log data from different sources, including Azure resources, applications, and operating systems. Azure Monitor also provides a robust alerting mechanism that allows users to set up alerts based on specific conditions or thresholds. These alerts can be configured to notify users via email, SMS, or other notification channels. Additionally, Azure Monitor offers customizable dashboards that allow users to visualize and analyze their monitoring data in a personalized and intuitive manner.

Azure Monitor integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, such as Azure Automation and Azure Logic Apps, enabling users to automate actions based on monitoring data. It also supports integration with third-party monitoring tools and services, providing flexibility and extensibility.

Overall, Azure Monitor is a powerful and versatile monitoring solution that helps users gain deep insights into the performance and health of their Azure resources and applications. It offers a wide range of features and integrations, making it a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing Azure environments.

Microsoft

Icinga monitors systems, network devices, infrastructure, and services, helping manage and analyze server resources. It automates ticket incidents and alerting, providing oversight of client Windows and Linux systems.

Icinga offers comprehensive monitoring of servers including CPU utilization and RAM space, facilitating automated incident management and alerting. Frequently deployed on-premises, this monitoring tool is key for managed services providers and organizations to oversee and ensure optimal performance of various environments, including applications like databases and web servers. It provides extensive features for creating custom plugins, stabilization, scalability, and high customization capabilities suitable for different infrastructure needs.

What are the key features of Icinga?

Event Handler: Facilitates automatic self-healing of systems.
Extensive Plugin Library: Offers a wide range of plugins for monitoring.
Ease of Use: Simplifies user experience with an intuitive interface and Icinga Director for easy configurations.
Open-Source Nature: Free to use, modify, and distribute.
Automation Capabilities: Integrates with APIs and Ansible Collections for automation.
Custom Plugins: Users can create and integrate their own plugins.
Stability and Scalability: Provides reliable performance across different scale infrastructures.

What are the benefits or ROI to look for when evaluating Icinga?

Critical Issue Highlighting: Effectively identifies and notifies about critical problems.
High Customization: Offers flexibility for diverse monitoring needs.
Automated Alerting: Reduces manual effort and improves response times.
Extensive Integration: Works seamlessly with other tools and platforms.

Icinga implementations span multiple industries, providing essential monitoring for IT infrastructure in healthcare, finance, and education. Managed services providers utilize Icinga to maintain and monitor client systems across various environments while ensuring optimal performance and compliance. It is highly valued in these sectors for its ability to customize monitoring, improving operational efficiency and reducing downtime.

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre

Azure Monitor vs. Icinga