Centreon vs Icinga vs Nagios XI comparison

Centreon is an all-in-one IT monitoring solution that is a network, system, applicative supervision, and monitoring tool. It is free and open source, and one of the most flexible and powerful monitoring softwares on the market.

Centreon Features

Centreon has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Supervision of hybrid infrastructures, from one end to the other
• Open and flexible architecture 
• Open-source solution, downloadable for free
• Filtering capability in GUI interface
• Proactive end to end monitoring
• Easily configurable and simple to handle
• Dedicated dashboard widgets
• Scalability
• Independent application for monitoring
• End to end reporting with actual logs

Centreon Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Centreon. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Single platform, multi-user rights & access: Centreon is designed with built-in ACL, allowing enterprise users access to the monitored data on a need-to-know basis.

• Smart data-mapping for customized macro & micro views: Centreon provides real-time custom views in multiple screens with graphic-rich data mapping, which also enables monitoring operators to act and troubleshoot from a distance.

• Ready monitoring intelligence & reporting: With Centreon, you can easily generate reports of essential operational KPIs by using pre-configured templates, and add reports as needed by exploiting the dedicated monitoring data warehouse.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Centreon users.

PeerSpot user Thor M., CEO at a tech services company, says, "The single-pane view provides us a view of all of our network infrastructure, and it is one of the most important tools that we use to see the status of our customers' networks. It provides a nice benefit when it comes to helping align IT operations with business objectives. The top-down views, dashboards, and business context reporting are things that are nice to have because you want to be able to show the customer that everything is working, that problems have been addressed, and that you're providing value.” 

Thomas C., Managing Director, Canada at Eva, comments, “The most valuable feature of the solution is the flexibility, the ability to integrate all kinds of equipment. As long as something has an IP you can monitor it. What we try to achieve all the time is not only saying a company's system is available, but to give additional data on the performance of the equipment. So the flexibility is what matters the most to us, where we can script everything. Centreon has a lot of Plugin Packs, meaning they support, by design, a lot of devices. And on top of that, we have the ability to add our own scripts and do whatever we want and display the data as we want in the central dashboards.”

Marcilio L., President at ITS Solucoes, expresses, "The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."

Florent Q., Network Engineer at a computer software company, mentions, "The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Third-party add-ons provide tools for monitoring virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.

Nagios XI uses a powerful Core 4 monitoring engine that provides users with the highest levels of server monitoring performance. This high degree of performance enables nearly limitless scalability and monitoring powers.

With Nagios XI, stakeholders can check up on their infrastructure status using the role-based web interface. Sophisticated dashboards enable access to monitoring information and third-party data. Administrators can easily set up permissions so users can only access the infrastructure they are authorized to view.

Nagios XI Benefits and Features

Some of the benefits and top features of using Nagios XI include:

• Extensive IT infrastructure monitoring: Comprehensively monitor all of your organization’s infrastructure’s components. Hundreds of third-party add-ons let you monitor virtually any internal application, service, or system.
  
  
• Proactivity: With built-in, automated trend analysis and capacity planning charts, organizations can plan infrastructure upgrades before legacy systems encounter unexpected issues. IT staff, business stakeholders, and end users are notified via email or SMS with details of the outage so they can begin handling the issue immediately.
  
  
• Multiple integration options: Numerous available APIs allow seamless integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting capabilities as well as custom interfaces are available, allowing you to customize Nagios XI to your company's needs.
  
  
• Complete visibility: Get a single view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. The Nagios XI dashboards provide at-a-glance access to monitoring information and third-party data. Views give users quick access to the most useful information.
  
  
• User-friendly interface: Customize the layout, design, and settings for each user’s GUI, providing clients and team members with the flexibility they need. Administrators can easily delegate control over monitoring configuration management, system settings, and more to end users and team members using the built-in web-based configuration interface. A configuration wizard guides users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications without understanding complex monitoring concepts.
  
  
• Configuration snapshots: Snapshots allow you to save and archive your most recent configurations. Later on, you can revert back to them whenever you like.
  
  
• Advanced user management: Ensure a secure infrastructure environment by easily setting up and managing user accounts and assigning custom roles with just a few mouse clicks.

Reviews from Real Users

Nagios XI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its integration options and monitoring abilities, as well as its alerting features.

David P., a senior DevOps engineer at EML Payments Ltd, writes, “We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.”

An IT-OSS manager at a comms service provider notes, “Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.”