Icinga is an open source network monitoring platform. It includes automation, modularized integration packages, and prebuilt alerts and reporting capabilities.
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Veeam ONE
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Veeam ONE is virtualization management technology from Ohio based VMware partner Veeam 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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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
Veeam One works great for monitoring virtual infrastructure. However, other dedicated server monitoring apps do better with monitoring the individual VMs. Where it stands out is its reporting functionality, which allows you to forecast growth and keep track of how you are using your resources. It is also great for companies without a big monitoring budget, as there is a pretty functional free version.
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.
Proactive Alerting - the product can provide email alerts to notify one of any issues in the environment.
Capacity Planning and Forecasting - it has the ability to provide an analysis of the current environment as well as provide a report to forecast future capacity requirements.
Monitoring and Reporting - the software can monitor you environment 24x7 with the ability to provide comprehensive reporting.
Basically the products works very well and we have been very pleased, but following are some picky details I could suggest for improvement specific to our needs.
We leave the GUI up on a TV in our Office and on our desktops to visibly see if anything is alerting. It would be nice if you could customize the view to have a smaller minimum view with just the widgets you wanted.
When the GUI starts on a multi-monitor setup it always returns to the primary and any popup windows always go to the primary instead of the monitor you have the application running in.
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.
The software is a joy to use. The user interface is good overall and you can find frequently needed things easily and quickly. Some less frequently needed things eg. settings are hidden under several menus and one might have to look for those for a while. We also haven't had any issues with the products reliability.
Support, as mentioned earlier, is often slow to respond for Veeam ONE requests. To Veeam's credit, they will work on an issue until they find a solution, and will even develop a specific hotfix for your environment if one is needed, but response time is just slow.
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.
Veeam One is very easy to use, easy to configure and get what you want. The integration for Veeam Backup is perfect, for today i think Veeam need to make Veeam One monitor Microsoft 365 envirioment, this will give great imput and integrated with Veeam Backup for 365 will be amezing.
The most valuable reports can safe us a lot of headaches and downtime. What used to be an emergency once in a while is an afterthought as we proactively prevent those same issues in less than 5 minutes a week.
The simplicity has allowed us to offload some virtual environment monitoring to a junior associate.
Initial deployment took some time because we couldn't get licensing figured out, but it has been smooth sailing since then.
