Checkmk is a solution for IT Monitoring of servers,
applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid),
containers, storage, databases and environment sensors. It can be
deployed under all major Linux distributions or users can run it as Docker
container or virtual appliance on other operating systems including
Windows.
The tool is available as a Raw
Edition, which is open-source, and as an Enterprise Edition with a many
additional enterprise features. The…
$0
up to 10 systems
Icinga
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.
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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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
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.
Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.
We moved over to Checkmk from Nagios which felt like a natural evolution at the time as the raw version is based on Nagios, I vaguely not having any major issues moving over at the time. We still use the Raw version but we are planning to move to the enterprise version in the next 6 – 12 months as our needs expand.
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.
