HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) is a solution for managing hardware across a variety of HP servers, in addition to storage and networking product. Some key features include: Inventory Management and Reporting, Health Management, and Firmware and System Software Updates Management.
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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.
This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products
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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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.
Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.
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.
Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.
