Cisco UCS Manager vs Icinga comparison

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Cisco UCS Manager

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Icinga and Cisco UCS Manager are competing products in IT infrastructure management. Icinga often has the upper hand in integration and cost due to its flexible pricing, while Cisco UCS excels in functionality and resource management.

Features: Icinga provides flexible pricing and extensive monitoring capabilities with seamless integration into various IT ecosystems. It features a modular design for enhanced adaptability and supports a wide range of plugins for increased monitoring scope. Cisco UCS Manager includes comprehensive server management with advanced hardware automation features and strong resource management capabilities within data center infrastructures. It also offers detailed monitoring of server components for optimized performance.

Room for Improvement: Icinga could enhance its user interface to be more intuitive for new users and improve its scalability for large enterprises. Documentation for advanced use cases could be expanded to better support complex environments. Cisco UCS Manager would benefit from a more simplified setup process and reducing complexity in its interface for non-expert users. Enhancing cross-compatibility with third-party systems would improve its integration capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Icinga is appreciated for straightforward deployment and integration into diverse IT environments, supported by a strong community. Cisco UCS Manager requires more involved setup but benefits from comprehensive customer service and documentation, offering strong support post-deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Icinga's cost-effective open-source model presents a lower initial setup cost, appealing to budget-conscious organizations aiming for high ROI. Cisco UCS Manager, while having higher initial costs, justifies it with significant ROI through improved efficiency and advanced capabilities in managing complex data center environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Manager vs. Icinga Report (Updated: March 2026).

Cisco UCS Manager 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

Cisco UCS Manager

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

18th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Icinga

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

30th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (26th), Server Monitoring (14th), Cloud Monitoring Software (24th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Manager is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 1.9%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cisco UCS Manager	1.3%
Icinga	1.9%
Other	96.8%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Rob-Croxford

Consultant at rcnss

A market leader with an enhanced user interface for seamless experience

There is room for improvement in terms of cost and complexity to set up. It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing. Some settings are still fairly well hidden, even the basic ones. Companies don't really understand how long it takes to set up. Also, when changes are pushed, it can take their phone line off the system for twenty minutes to half an hour. Out-of-the-box functionality is an issue, too. I know that my company is different, however, the basics are always the same. You do your tap lines, zip lines, and stuff like that, then you get your internal phone line system. That can all be automated and scripted, and it's probably part of the automation process. However, I haven't really seen it.

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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

"I strongly recommend that you go with a Cisco UCS solution for a cloud business."

"The most valuable features of Cisco UCS Manager include the visibility it provides and the ease of identifying issues within the Cisco environment."

"Technical support has been good so far. We haven't had any issues with them. We're satisfied with the level of service they provide our company."

"The management is one of the most valuable features of this solution, and I also like the dashboard, as it is quite user-friendly."

"Cisco UCS Manager is a very useful product for managing our entire ecosystem for Cisco products."

"If I had to choose between other submissions, I would choose the Cisco UCS every time."

"Cisco UCS Manager is overall a good package because it offers a GUI interface and a CLI."

"The management is one of the most valuable features of this solution."

More Cisco UCS Manager pros

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

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

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

"I use it for monitoring infrastructure and it was very good for that issue."

"If you have a small infrastructure or a small number of devices that you want to monitor, then I think it's a good solution."

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

"Icinga2 was designed to delegate, distribute and balance tasks between several nodes."

"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."

More Icinga pros

Cons

"Cisco UCS is expensive compared to others. The Cisco UCS Chassis is more expensive than a standalone server, but some companies require standalone servers because of their production load and affordability. You need to pay more if you require more features on the Blade or if you need more ports on the switch."

"Cisco UCS Manager should have a simplified deployment in the sense of not having multiple machines, demilitarized zones, and on-premise options."

"The primary challenge we face is identifying the correct version to deploy during firmware upgrades or compute updates."

"The installation and upgrade sytems need to be improved."

"There is room for improvement in the software part of Cisco UCS Manager. It should be more user-friendly, especially when creating policies."

"The automation within the solution needs to be simplified."

"There is room for improvement in terms of cost and complexity to set up. It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing."

"Cisco UCS Manager is not a scalable solution because once you have 160 blades, it cannot be expanded more."

More Cisco UCS Manager 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 of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."

"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."

"The user interface should be improved."

"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."

"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."

"Sometimes, it is very hard to keep an overview of what's happening."

More Icinga cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco UCS Manager’s annual licensing fee is expensive."

"We need to take a license for each port, which amounts to a big sum."

"Cisco UCS is more expensive than Dell and HP, but it is more reliable. I see less issues and it's quite stable."

"With product discounts which can be negotiated, the product is a great value."

"You buy the hardware and then you get Cisco UCS Manager for free."

"The pricing for Cisco UCS Manager is okay for its market, so it's a four out of five for me."

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

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

"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 free to use."

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

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

"It's an open-source solution."

"The solution is cheap."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

15%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	18

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Manager?

When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Manager?

My experience with the pricing of Cisco UCS Manager ( /products/cisco-ucs-manager-reviews ) is that it is reasonable. Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offe...

What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Manager?

For improvements, while the current graphical user interface is satisfactory, it could be further simplified for different tasks. While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the...

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...

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Product Reports

Cisco UCS Manager

Download Cisco UCS Manager product report

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Also Known As

No data available

Icinga Cloud Monitoring

Overview

Cisco UCS Manager helps significantly reduce management and administration expenses by automating routine tasks to increase operational agility. Customers can extend the benefits of Cisco UCS Manager globally across an enterprise to thousands of servers in multiple domains with Cisco UCS Central Software.

Cisco

Icinga is a robust tool for monitoring IT infrastructure, known for its distributed monitoring capabilities and seamless integration with multiple platforms. It efficiently observes servers, network devices, and environments like Linux and Windows, enabling proactive issue identification and resource management.

With a focus on task delegation and clustering, Icinga offers an intuitive interface through its GUI and Icinga Director, simplifying configuration. The extensive plugin library supports diverse technologies, while the API allows automation with tools like Terraform and Ansible. Despite its strengths, users report challenges with data display in the GUI, a need for improved dashboards, and complex configuration processes. Users benefit from its SNMP alerts, email notifications, and automated incident handling, making it essential for managed service environments and enterprises.

What are the key features of Icinga?

Task Delegation: Streamlines monitoring tasks across distributed systems.
Event Handler: Enables automatic service recovery with minimal intervention.
Plugin Library: Offers extensive support for integrating diverse technologies.
API Accessibility: Facilitates automation with popular tools like Terraform.
Custom Plugins: Allows easy creation and personalization for monitoring needs.

What benefits should you consider in Icinga reviews?

Flexibility: Tailors monitoring to specific requirements with community support.
Scalability: Successfully manages growing infrastructure demands.
Proactivity: Enhances issue identification and resource allocation.
Integration: Seamlessly works with existing IT operations platforms.

Icinga is widely adopted in IT environments for monitoring servers, networks, and applications across industries such as finance, healthcare, and technology. Its ability to integrate with various operating systems and automation platforms makes it a versatile choice for industries prioritizing comprehensive surveillance and proactive management of their infrastructure.

Sample Customers

Management Science Associates, Peak 10, Virtual Consulting Professionals

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

Cisco UCS Manager vs. Icinga