Icinga Reviews

Icinga2 was designed to delegate, distribute and balance tasks between several nodes. I like the clustering feature and running satellite servers, which check their own zones and report back to the masters. Truly a distributed monitoring solution!

I deploy this solution for customers; therefore, it didn't improve my organisation. Still, customers say that they like the modern design approach and the possibilities one has in terms of automated configuration and automation. Most of them integrate Icinga2 into their automation tools and therefore configure the monitoring solution without much manual efforts.

The modern Web GUI Icingaweb2, a separate product, though, has some issues when displaying data (such as downtimes). There are edge cases where it seems like the displayed data is not consistent.

In addition, in my personal opinion, Icingaweb2 should get a more structured design. Sometimes, it is very hard to keep an overview of what's happening.

I used Icinga 2.4 for several months and have been using Icinga 2.6 for four weeks now.

We have not encountered any deployment issues at all. The deployment is very easy; there are even wizards helping you to skip manual configuration tasks. You still can automatize the deployment, though.

Stability is great.

Icinga2 is meant to scale in many directions; thus, no issues should occur here.

I did not contact the customer service. The community is very active and developers usually reply within hours on GitHub.

I did not contact the technical support.

I used Nagios 3.x and tested Check_MK. Both are great solutions. However, Icinga2 comes with the best scalability and flexibility in terms of configuration. Furthermore, the API is great.

The initial setup can be tricky, I highly advise to study the docs before getting started. Many configuration options are set indirectly, depending on how you set up Icinga2 (in terms of infrastructure design).

We are deploying it ourselves.

Icinga2 is free, but you can sign a support contract with the vendor.

Icinga 2 is so flexible that it makes sense to either have some people read the docs and carefully evaluate all configuration possibilities; or, if possible, it makes sense to get someone on board and receive help in designing your monitoring platform.