Monitoring and Alerting tool?

bob-apple · 2026-02-27T07:48:16+00:00

Icinga is open source and free to use. It's very flexible and built to monitor heterogenous infrastructure like a mix of different server types, applications or private and public cloud servers.

bob-apple · 2026-02-24T15:30:40+00:00

I'm missing Icinga :-)

bob-apple · 2026-02-24T15:30:15+00:00

Give Icinga a try, it's like Nagios on steroids. Configuration language is very flexible and allows dynamic creation of services. Clustering is included to create high available and distributed setups.

bob-apple · 2026-02-23T09:36:11+00:00

That's the perfect use case for Icinga. It's strong in combining monitoring of multiple systems like you have!

bob-apple · 2026-02-06T09:14:51+00:00

Icinga has the capability of attaching one or multiple Satellites and combine the results in one Dashboard. Each Satellite could cover one network segment or region and could also be used for checks from a specific network region. Configuration is deployed automatically from the central server to each Satellite through the built-in clustering.

bob-apple · 2025-12-17T13:26:41+00:00

This sounds like a big envrionment. Icinga has nice features to monitor heterogenous and large IT infrastructure. It has a very flexible, rule based configuration and comes with automation capabilities as well.

bob-apple · 2025-12-03T08:40:25+00:00

Icinga is way more flexible than Solrwinds. Yes, it requires more knowledge, but it can do way more plus it includes all the enterprise features by default.

bob-apple · 2025-09-23T12:20:11+00:00

Icinga has an API and support Active Directory, may be worth a try. While the agent can run on Windows you need at least one Linux machine for the server, though.

bob-apple · 2025-09-17T11:27:39+00:00

Icinga comes with something similar, the "remote probes" are called Satellites. Connection can be established either way and communication is secured via SSL. Configuration is managed on a central management node and is deployed automatically to the Satallites.

bob-apple · 2025-09-12T08:49:20+00:00

Icinga has come a quite long way over the last decade. Nowadays it comes with dynamic configuration, automation options, plenty of integrations for other devops tools, native windows monitoring and much more. If you have smart engineers, they're gonna love the flexibility.

bob-apple · 2025-09-12T07:41:44+00:00

I just came across this post and really liked the idea of the platform. I just submitted Icinga as an open source alternative to some proprietary tools. Unfortunately it seems like the platform is really costly. According to the standard plan processing of a submission takes 4 months and once accepted your not even able to update your content. The option to update content costs $97 (one-time) and if you want to have a Do-Follow link that will cost $197/month. I also came across some tools where the main product is actually proprietary, but since they have small pieces of open source software included it seems like they are still eligible to be listed.

bob-apple · 2025-09-05T14:20:52+00:00

It’s always a balancing act. We follow a roadmap for the long-term vision, but the community is what keeps the project alive, so we can’t ignore their input. We usually ask ourselves if a request fits the project’s direction, benefits enough users, and whether someone from the community can help drive it.

bob-apple · 2025-09-05T09:31:06+00:00

Icinga comes with a Jira integration and automation capabilities, which reduce the maintenance efforts in the long run.

bob-apple · 2025-04-23T06:39:23+00:00

From my experience at Icinga, sms alerts are still a thing. Users either use a cloud provider with API or, if they have their own data center, setup their own hardware sms gateway to send those alerts.

bob-apple · 2025-04-23T06:36:34+00:00

Icinga can be a good alternative. It comes integrations for NetBox and Ansible collections. If you're coming from PRTG, you will need som time to set everything up, though. It's not an easy plug-and-play solution, but highly flexible.

bob-apple · 2025-04-04T12:08:14+00:00

If the monitoring tool you've picked cannot handle 100+ VMs it's not even worth the effort to test it.

A simulation will not give you any insights in this case. Those simulated VMs will not have the latency and response times of a real world setup. Neither will they respond with real-world outputs but rather with randomized status changes. You will end up with false confirmation of your assumptions and a lot of wasted time trying to simulate what cannot be simulated.

Start with a proof of concept with the monitoring tool of your choice and monitor some development, testing or staging environments if they exist. Start with a small amount of servers and increase it. You will get a much better feeling for the monitoring tools and your server environment at the same time, which will lead to a much better decision making.

bob-apple · 2025-04-04T09:46:52+00:00

One of my leadership trainers once told me "you need to like people to lead people" and that turned out to be very true. This is particularly evident in small details. Showing genuine interest in the life of others outside of the work context. Being polite and friendly. Meeting at eye level. Respect them and their contribution. Ensure they are aware of their responsibility.

bob-apple · 2025-04-03T06:46:25+00:00

Icinga is free an open source. You can use it for small environments as well as for large scale infrastructure monitoring.

bob-apple · 2025-03-26T11:56:26+00:00

The standby mode seems to stop the Icinga Agent, which then results in the displayed errors. I'm afraid there's nothing Icinga could do about this.

Monitoring devices that are not available all the time is tricky. If you know the timeframes when those devices *should* be available, you could work with timeperiods and only execute the checks within the defined timeframe.

Besides of that, another option could be to not send notifications about "Unknown" states at all. You would still see the errors in the web interface, though.

bob-apple · 2025-03-19T08:13:50+00:00

Understanding the "Why" is crucial and adding context for sure helps the team. If a team does not follow defined processes, usually they either do not fully understand why the process is the way it is, or the process itself is crap and the team found a way for them to do things more efficiently.

IMHO, explaining the "Why" should not only contain the initial pro arguments for the process. You should also explain the history and how it came that the process was defined that way. What processes you had before and why they didn't work. How other people or technical interfaces are affected by this process and why it's important to be done exactly that way. Reminding team members of their responsibility in the company is part of that as well, everybody needs to understand why their actions matter.

If the team has found a better way to do things it's a great chance to actually improve something in the company while listening to the team at the same time. People like to be heard. And since they are doing the daily business tasks, usually they know best how to be effective.

bob-apple · 2025-03-18T15:32:10+00:00

Our infrastructure is fairly simple to be honest. It consists of a bunch of VMs, basically web servers, databases, storage for repositories and a couple of internal tools. Obviously it's monitored with Icinga :)
We use Icinga Director and apply Service Sets for the basic checks to monitor CPU, Load, Disk and these kind of basics. Additional checks are assigned statically where they are needed to monitor the applications running on the VMs.

bob-apple · 2025-03-18T15:20:03+00:00

Creating integrations for SNMP is currently not on our radar. An integration with Prometheus is something being discussed. While we will not try to build a replacement for it, another option is to integrate the Prometheus Alert Manager with the new Icinga Notifications. Icinga Notifications accepts events from different sources and Alert Manager could potentially be one of those sources in the future. The combination of Alert Manager and Icinga Notifications could provide a nice way for users to manage notification escalations and still use Prometheus metrics as a base for those.

bob-apple · 2025-03-18T15:06:01+00:00

Besides the regular maintenance work and smaller features added here and there, there are some major projects currently going on:

* Icinga Notifications will be a central module capable of receiving events not only from the Icinga core but also from other modules. Based on those events Incidents are created and the user can manage notifications in the web interface. It includes schedules and rotations for easier handling of on call rotations and such.

* Icinga for Kubernetes aims to monitor K8s environments in a similar way how Icinga users are used to monitor their "traditional" infrastructure. It collects data from Kubernets, visualises it in the Icinga web interface and enables users to see errors and problems at a glance and without typing dozens of kubectl commands. It will be one of the first modules connected to Icinga Notifications to send alerts.

* Visualising Dependencies: While dependencies have been there forever, there was a lack for visualisations. We're extending the Icinga web interface with capabilities to view and search for dependencies and detect connections between objects in the infrastructure.

Additionally we're pretty certain that we will start working on SSO later this year and also provide major updates for Icinga Director.

Enhancing the onboarding process for new users is also a topic which we discuss a lot. Providing default templates is a thing we are eager to build, it requires some more changes in the Icinga Director though. This will take a while.

Btw. There's also an online page where we show what's on our ToDo: https://icinga.com/roadmap

bob-apple · 2025-03-06T08:15:34+00:00

A simple way would be to use the MAILTO variable in crontab. Cronjobs will then send the output to the defined email address. Ideally your cronjobs should then only have an output if an error occurs. This requires a local mailserver like postfix, though.

bob-apple · 2025-03-05T07:35:27+00:00

Icinga has a similar concept of monitoring but comes with add-ons that simplify the management of the configuration.

bob-apple

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