G2

SURESH K.

Linux Automation Engineer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

Originally submitted 10/21/2026

"Running Icinga at Enterprise Scale: What Works Well and What Could Be Better"

5/5

What do you like best about Icinga Infrastructure Monitoring?

What I appreciate most about Icinga is the flexibility it offers, especially when managing monitoring across a large and distributed infrastructure. I've been working with Icinga for several years, from our migration from Icinga 1 to Icinga 2 to managing and improving the platform in our day-to-day operations.

At Giesecke+Devrient, we use Icinga to monitor around 4,500 systems and over 48,000 services across more than 80 locations worldwide. We have a distributed setup with redundant masters and satellites, which allows us to monitor infrastructure across different sites and network zones while maintaining a central view of the environment. In my experience, Icinga handles this scale well when the architecture is properly designed.

One of the things I value most is how easily we can integrate it with our existing automation. We've automated monitoring deployment, onboarding and decommissioning through AWX and our infrastructure workflows, so adding or removing servers doesn't require the same manual effort it used to. The API and configuration flexibility have been particularly useful here.

We also monitor a wide range of technologies, including Linux, Windows, VMware, network devices, databases and applications. Being able to use existing plugins or develop our own checks for specific requirements is a major advantage. Icinga Web 2 gives us the visibility we need for daily monitoring, troubleshooting and handling alerts.

Overall, Icinga has given us a reliable and highly customizable monitoring platform without the licensing restrictions of many commercial solutions. It takes experience and effort to operate at this scale, but the flexibility and control it provides are the main reasons I value it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Icinga Infrastructure Monitoring?

One area I feel could be improved is how Icinga handles monitoring workloads during satellite maintenance or failover, particularly in large environments.

We have locations where a satellite pair is responsible for monitoring close to 1,000 hosts and several thousand services. When one satellite is taken down for patching or maintenance, the remaining satellite has to handle the monitoring workload. This can lead to sudden spikes in check execution and resource utilization, especially when a large number of checks are scheduled around the same time.

Because of this, we have to plan satellite maintenance carefully to avoid overloading the remaining node. Better workload distribution and smoother handling of check execution during failover would make a real difference in larger deployments.

Another area I'd like to see improved is the dashboard experience in Icinga Web 2. While users can create their own filtered views, having centrally managed dashboards that can be shared with teams or made available to all users would be much more practical. In a global environment like ours, it would help us provide consistent monitoring views without everyone having to configure their own filters.

Overall, Icinga works well for our requirements, but improvements in these areas would make day-to-day operations easier, especially for teams managing large distributed environments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Icinga Infrastructure Monitoring solving and how is that benefiting you?

One of our main challenges is maintaining reliable monitoring across a global infrastructure with different technologies, network zones and security requirements. Icinga's distributed architecture fits our environment particularly well, including restricted and isolated network segments where direct connectivity to central systems is limited. We can execute monitoring checks locally through satellites while maintaining centralized visibility across our infrastructure.

Automation has also made a big difference in our daily operations. We've integrated Icinga with AWX and our existing infrastructure workflows, allowing us to automatically deploy monitoring agents, onboard new servers and remove systems when they are decommissioned. This has reduced manual effort and helped us maintain consistent monitoring standards across different locations.

From an operational perspective, Icinga helps us detect service failures, resource issues and application problems early, giving our teams an opportunity to investigate and resolve them before they develop into major incidents. Features such as direct SSH access from our monitoring interface, custom actions, acknowledgements and scheduled downtimes also make troubleshooting and routine maintenance more convenient for our operations teams.

What I particularly value is that Icinga is flexible enough to work with our existing infrastructure and operational processes rather than forcing us to change how we manage them. It gives us centralized visibility, supports our automation requirements and helps our teams respond more effectively to issues across a complex enterprise environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.