Icinga is used by the hosting and support teams. To give us a dashboard for any current incidents but also to show warnings for us to react before it can become a bigger problem. We also make use of services such as certificate monitoring
Pros
Incident dashboard
Business processing
Stats
Cons
Decluttering - the dashboard seems to get very overwhelming
Segregation - would be helpful to split environments or clients into different areas
Alerting
Likelihood to Recommend
When incorporated with other services as part of the monitoring stack Icinga is very helpful. Although on its own you will need to keep the dashboard open to get the alerts making it less helpful. Making use of other services such as opsgenie, elastic search, kibana and graphana to name a few.
Icinga was in place when I started, it continues to be used for a legacy environment. It monitors the status and availability of servers and services, previously for the entire production and quality assurance environments and now just for a legacy mail processing system. We chose to move away from Icinga about a year ago.
Pros
Wealth of community-developed plugins.
Stable codebase.
Icinga 2 supports distributed monitoring.
Very performant, can support tens of thousands of checks per server.
Cons
Difficult, arcane configuration.
Very difficult to integrate into modern configuration management systems.
Hard to fit concepts like auto-scaling groups of ephemeral servers into Icinga's aging conception of servers as static entities.
Likelihood to Recommend
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In general, I would not recommend using any monitoring software based on Nagios (Icinga is a fork of Nagios) due to the outdated concepts inherent in those systems.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.
Like Nagios, we used Icinga as a network monitoring solution. It provided us with insights as to when a device was not functioning properly or failed completely. It was implemented throughout the entire organization, monitoring all our most critical assets.
Pros
Excellent monitoring solution, once you understand the configuration language adding additional hosts and services is easy.
Scalable and highly configurable.
Beautiful web UI.
Very very nice API.
Cons
High learning curve, setting up Icinga from scratch can be a bit of a challenge starting out.
If the io2db process fails you UI stops updating, which can be very frustrating.
There is no simple mechanism for adding new hosts and services through the web UI, it's all very config-file based.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anywhere you have critical assets to be monitored Icinga is a good option. In order to make the most use of it, it has to have someone dedicated to supporting it as there are no built-in "auto-discover" new hosts options.
Icinga is one of our internal monitoring user interfaces. It's the front end to nagios basically. We incorporate it with our Pager-Duty service and will receive pages if critical services go down. Our technical operations team is the primary department that uses Icinga, however more and more of the engineering and development teams are getting logins as they will be given more responsibility in monitoring their deployed services.
Pros
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.
Cons
The user interface is good, but I had trouble with the customization of the front end.
Certain things can be copied and pasted. Certain things can't. I would like to see all things be able to be copied and pasted.
Likelihood to Recommend
Icinga is a good tool for monitoring all aspects of your infrastructure. Because Nagios/Icinga are very customizable, you can monitor anything. I wouldn't use this tool for time series data or trending. There aren't graphs or at least we haven't used the graphing features.
