Icinga Infrastructure Monitoring

What do you like best?

It is open source and free, meaning the software is easily extendible. All Nagios plugins, as well as all the community plugins are usable with Icinga. You can use alot of advanced features, including check scheduling, notification escalation or a very detailed user access and management system. It is very easy to extend the system with extra checks or hosts due to the templating system.

What do you dislike?

The setup of the software can be quite complicated depending on the OS you are deploying on (I deployed on Alpine Linux) and the documentation for this is not complete. After setup, the initial learning curve is quite steep and takes quite some time. For instance, you need to create a notification template to create a notification object to create a user template to create a user, etc.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Do a small pilot before trying to add too much at once. Also consider adding meta-tags to objects, so you can use these to define conditionals.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Icinga as our monitoring system for each of our 25+ servers. It performs manual and automated checking and notification of abnormalities. The performance data generated by these checks are stored and visualized in Grafana dashboards for business insight.