Icinga vs. StackState

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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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

Incentivized

StackState is suitable for 1000+ hosts. Sometimes specific applications can take higher development time. Well suited for hybrid platforms to build end to end service alarms and service views. Advanced UI navigation might require some training. It is not a simple download and deploy software. It will require development in an agile model. Where newer versions are deployed to suit exact client requirements. Support contract with the StackState Engineer for development of use-cases is required and very useful.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Giving observability of the entire IT stack
• Custom alerting options.
• Ingesting many different types of data.
• Requesting new features is encouraged and they often add them quite quickly.

• Decluttering - the dashboard seems to get very overwhelming
• Segregation - would be helpful to split environments or clients into different areas
• Alerting

Incentivized

• Although license is based on number of hosts, licenses needs to be renewed every year or the StackState server cannot be used. A single license model does not serve all client requirements.
• Custom development could be time consuming.
• The original view with all the hosts on single view is quite useless. We got value only from smaller views.

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.

Incentivized

Some elements of the product haven't had the usability upgrade yet and can be a bit technical. This is to be expected as they are trying to solve complex problems. I am sure that in the future, steps will be made to simplify this as well for the users / administrators / developers of the platform.

It's swift, they're thinking along with us. It's a "collaboration approach" rather than a (traditional) customer-supplier relation. Out new ideas are taken in concern and often ends up in enhancements of StackState

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.

Incentivized

• With one check you know which applications are faulty e.g. after an upgrade. Which is big time saver
• You easily detect outages ion the applications so that your customer ideally does not even realize there was an outage.
• Detect if the environment does deliver the same result as in the same time as before to detect shortages.
• Additional information when debugging. Saved us several hours where we could simply point to a database which was slow.

Incentivized

• Easier and faster Root-Cause analysis.