Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Manager, formerly from CA Technologies, is a unified tool for systems monitoring and analytics. It offers multiple deployment options for IT teams and MSPs .
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Icinga
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
I've been really happy with the amount of performance data and reporting options that I've been able to get out of UIM. Performance hardware statistics take no more than a few mouse clicks. Also, as mentioned in the pros section, deployment and configuration is very intuitive and easy.
If you're running bare-metal in a datacenter and your hosts are fairly static, it's probably okay to use something like Icinga to monitor your systems. In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems. There are a number of good SaaS monitoring solutions which are superior and several open source projects which implement an automation-centric approach to monitoring
Server performance can be done exceptionally well with UIM. It monitors various OS flavors: POSIX (Aix, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, zLinux), and Windows.
With just a handful of probe s(CDM, NTevl, NTservices, NTperf, processes, logmon) your dashboards can be populated within minutes after installation of the product and discovering servers. One particular feature I like is MCS which allows you to perform template based monitoring which allows for implementing standards and including exceptions.
The SNMP collector monitors anything that is SNMP capable. With the ability to build a template out of templates here as well, you can standardize monitoring by device, vendor, or model regardless of device type: routers, switches, storage, load balancers, etc.
The UMP is the presentation layer. Without OOTB dashboards, you see quickly how your environment is performing. And with true multi-tenancy, you can separate data by customer.
I think Icinga has a great search feature. I can always search for the hosts, host groups, or check names. When using just regular Nagios, I don't recall being able to do this search.
The fact that I can use Active Directory or LDAP for logins is a great feature.
If you are familiar with Nagios, it's very simple to combine the two products to get a polished finished product.
Icinga is a solid solution which does everything it promises. It is backwards compatible with most Nagios instances, making the transition very easy. Once you get the hang of installing new plugins and editing configuration files expanding its monitoring capabilities are easy.
Basically, these other tools were easy to setup, I think sometimes even more that Nimsoft in some scenarios. But after you need to expand the size of the environment, or in big environments, for me, Nimsoft is the tool that allows you to grow with them. All of the other tools start to present problems in the database. When you need to think in bigger machines or start to "code inside the tool" to solve some performance problems, and other problems that appear. Nimsoft comes with a big set of documentation, and the support really works, as fast as you need, even as higher as you pay.
Icinga was initially a fork of Nagios. Over time, the configuration language was replaced with something more programmatic. This configuration language is one of the big sellers of this product. It allows flexible, quick configuration of large sets of hosts and services with minimal input. Comparing it to other products like WhatsUp Gold, Zenoss, Zabbix, etc., it stands out as incredibly flexible. Adding additional features to Icinga can be as simple as searching for them online. And if they don't yet exist, there is a full API available for custom extensions.
