Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
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Sensu
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Sensu, now from Sumo Logic (acquired in June of 2021) is presented as a future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline is used by businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain visibility into their multi-cloud environments. The vendor boasts companies like Sony, Box.com, and Activision use Sensu to help deliver value to their customers. Sensu offers a comprehensive monitoring solution for enterprises, providing visibility across every…
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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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
Sooner or later, companies are going to figure out that there's more to monitoring than what Nagios can provide. For those that want to dip their toe in the water and still provide backward compatibility with a legacy Nagios environment, Sensu is a good choice. It's mainly for businesses that want more than Nagios but don't want to take the full plunge with something radically different and metric-based such as Prometheus. Having moved to metric-based monitoring so far as I'm able, I can say with confidence that it's far better than what Nagios or Sensu provide.
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.
Sensu's customer support was always willing to work with us but never really seemed to learn much from our experiences. I think they get a lot of customers with DevOps IT teams that are willing to put in a lot of elbow grease to get the most of Sensu's architecture. However, despite explaining my continued disappointment with their documentation and the overall flow of the product, I never got much more than a "sorry" and a notice that their documentation was open source if I wanted to contribute to it. The problem, of course, is that you can't document what you don't understand. I'm a former technical writer, so I know that better than most.
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.
Have used New Relic and Sematext Cloud for APM and for tracking over days and visualizing the issues. But those are very expensive as compared to Sensu.
