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Azure Monitor vs Icinga comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th)
Icinga
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (26th), Server Monitoring (14th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 3.1%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 2.5%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Azure Monitor3.1%
Icinga2.5%
Other94.4%
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Andy Rabern - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Telemetry insights have improved how I track user behavior and application performance daily
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing. I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether. The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.
Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Azure Monitor is very stable."
"The solution has tons of valuable features."
"Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment."
"The overall product rating is nine out of ten."
"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 scalability of the solution is pretty good."
"It has improved the quality of application and through this we are able to analyze application performance, it gives alerts and insights of the application which helps us so much"
"It is a move-in powerful feature compared to other market-leading tools."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"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."
"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."
"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."
"I would recommend Icinga; it's an open-source solution, it's quite easy and simple to use, and checks can be run with Python code and Shell Script code."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"The most valuable feature is one that not many are even aware of, as Icinga has a self-healing event handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted, and you can configure the handler to take action after the critical alarm without human interaction."
"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."
 

Cons

"If it is configured incorrectly, you can end up with a huge bill."
"If Azure Monitor wants to compete with other APM products in the industry, it has to stitch together the information and user flow."
"The scalability could be improved as there are some limitations."
"Currently, it seems it's complicated to get the correct information in terms of what to do and how things work."
"Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved."
"I would like more transparency when we use the solution with another environment, like on-premises, or on another cloud environment, like AWS or GCP."
"Using Azure Monitor and Azure Arc separately to monitor different environments can be complicated."
"Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"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."
"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."
"The installation and configuration are very complex."
"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."
"It is not really adequate for our current needs. It causes additional issues which we have to work around and takes us time that a better solution would not."
"There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company is okay with the current pricing of the solution."
"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 licensing is a monthly fee."
"I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability."
"Azure Monitor is cheaper compared to other third-party monitoring tools."
"There is a monthly fee for the alerts triggered and the data stored."
"The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website."
"Azure Monitor's price is minimal to the point of being almost negligible."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"The solution is free to use."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"The solution is cheap."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

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 needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it...
What is your primary use case for Azure Monitor?
I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently...
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...
What is your primary use case for Icinga?
We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Icinga Cloud Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Icinga and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.