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Nagios is great, but Icinga fixed some serious issues with it that were long-standing. At least in the beginning, the reason for the fork was extremely clear, a

Nagios is great, but Icinga fixed some serious issues with it that were long-standing. At least in the beginning, the reason for the fork was extremely clear, and there was no doubt the fork made sense. As of right now, I'm not so sure there's any huge advantage of Icinga 1.x over Nagios 3.x, other than a better UI. However, Icinga2 and icingaweb2 are both coming along very nicely. In a position I just recently left, I was using Icinga2 in production, and I really loved it for its performance and clustering capabilities. It really blows Nagios out of the water in those aspects. When you configure the active/passive "master" nodes in a datacenter, the checks get split between the two nodes with only one updating the DB (per the docs), and in practice, this seemed to keep the load very low for us, even with over 20,000 checks polling at least once per minute. I realize the story is more about history than a direct comparison between Icinga 1.x and Nagios, but I just wanted to share our experience with anyone who may be considering the two options - don't forget to consider Icinga2! It should also be noted that I still really love Nagios, and the later versions have resolved at least some of the issues we've had with it in the past.

MichaelGG 11y ago
Have you tried OpsView? They package up Nagios with an easy installer and nice UI. Graphing gets enabled by default. It's all very slick and easy. I've used it a couple times and it makes Nagios a far better system. OpsView is mainly open source, though they have a commercial edition with extra features
- moe 11y ago
  OpsView is mainly open source, though they have a commercial edition with extra features It's only free for up to 25 hosts. Then it costs at least $65/mo (for up to 250 hosts) plus the fees for extra features.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Oh, hmm I think that might be a new limitation then. (Which only makes sense since they gotta make money somehow...)
    - voidz 11y ago
      25 hosts: free. 26 hosts: high costs. Yeah, they could make that more appealing :)
      - dvanduzer 11y ago
        If you are worried about spending money when expanding to 26 hosts, you aren't their market anyway. If you're worried about spending a few grand on monitoring for around ~100 hosts or more, then you have a very strange business model.
        brianwawok 11y ago
        The problem is 26 bare metal servers is very different from 26 VPSes.
  - newsvatore 11y ago
    Nope. Never seemed appealing to me, as I have easily installed Nagios with the graphing plugins and other added features in the past by hand - for a few companies at least. One of the biggest wins of Icinga2 for Nagios shops is the fact that it can be sort of retrofitted to work with your existing Nagios hosts using NRPE. Of course, NRPE is highly insecure and this is not recommended, blah blah, but it works, and I'm sure there are more than just a few people still using and older version of NRPE in production.

MichaelGG 11y ago

Have you tried OpsView? They package up Nagios with an easy installer and nice UI. Graphing gets enabled by default. It's all very slick and easy. I've used it a couple times and it makes Nagios a far better system. OpsView is mainly open source, though they have a commercial edition with extra features

moe 11y ago
OpsView is mainly open source, though they have a commercial edition with extra features It's only free for up to 25 hosts. Then it costs at least $65/mo (for up to 250 hosts) plus the fees for extra features.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Oh, hmm I think that might be a new limitation then. (Which only makes sense since they gotta make money somehow...)
  - voidz 11y ago
    25 hosts: free. 26 hosts: high costs. Yeah, they could make that more appealing :)
    - dvanduzer 11y ago
      If you are worried about spending money when expanding to 26 hosts, you aren't their market anyway. If you're worried about spending a few grand on monitoring for around ~100 hosts or more, then you have a very strange business model.
      - brianwawok 11y ago
        The problem is 26 bare metal servers is very different from 26 VPSes.
- newsvatore 11y ago
  Nope. Never seemed appealing to me, as I have easily installed Nagios with the graphing plugins and other added features in the past by hand - for a few companies at least. One of the biggest wins of Icinga2 for Nagios shops is the fact that it can be sort of retrofitted to work with your existing Nagios hosts using NRPE. Of course, NRPE is highly insecure and this is not recommended, blah blah, but it works, and I'm sure there are more than just a few people still using and older version of NRPE in production.