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Azure Monitor vs Icinga comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (7th)
Icinga
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (26th), Server Monitoring (14th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 3.1%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Icinga is 2.5%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Azure Monitor3.1%
Icinga2.5%
Other94.4%
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Andy Rabern - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Telemetry insights have improved how I track user behavior and application performance daily
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing. I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether. The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.
Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Net Consulting
A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification
I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"One of the most useful aspects of this solution is the out-of-the-box functionality on all areas, especially on Application Insights, zero instrumentation, and artificial intelligence for event correlation."
"Some good integration capabilities are present in the tool."
"The overall product rating is nine out of ten."
"Provides an overview and high-level information."
"The solution works well overall. It's easy to implement and simple to use."
"The most valuable feature is that it ensures our servers are up."
"The upside to the solution is if you are working in a Microsoft or Azure environment, it makes things easier."
"Recently, they have improved their integration with other resources, so we get even more robust data."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
"Macros and the ability to connect it to Google Maps are valuable features."
"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"I use it for monitoring infrastructure and it was very good for that issue."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"The most valuable feature is one that not many are even aware of, as Icinga has a self-healing event handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted, and you can configure the handler to take action after the critical alarm without human interaction."
"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
 

Cons

"In my opinion, Azure Monitor is not the best solution available on the market."
"If it is configured incorrectly, you can end up with a huge bill."
"The product should integrate well with other tools or clouds in the future, as it is one of the areas where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
"The product is not as good as a lot of market-leading products; I wouldn't recommend the solution at all and would direct other companies to go to either ExtraHop, New Relic, or Dynatrace instead."
"The price could be lower but it is not a must."
"I will rate Azure Monitor a seven out of ten, because this solution has two things that we don't like, e.g. it doesn't tell you what and how it happened."
"Currently, it seems it's complicated to get the correct information in terms of what to do and how things work."
"If Azure Monitor wants to compete with other APM products in the industry, it has to stitch together the information and user flow."
"The connection between Icinga and Icinga Web."
"Network Discovery capabilities would be extremely helpful."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"The user interface should be improved."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"At this time, the layout of the website is a bit difficult. It should be more user-friendly for changing the background and logos."
"It is not really adequate for our current needs. It causes additional issues which we have to work around and takes us time that a better solution would not."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Customers of Azure Monitor must pay an amount that depends largely on how many services they need to integrate and the storage space required in terms of logs, etc. If they only have a few small services to monitor, the price won't be too high, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, it can certainly get pricey."
"The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts."
"Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads."
"The product offers a pay-as-you-go model to users. The charges are to be paid according to the usage of the product."
"Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution, which is why it would work best on small-scale projects."
"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."
"It's a costly solution"
"The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"The solution is cheap."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The solution is free to use."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it...
What is your primary use case for Azure Monitor?
I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...
What is your primary use case for Icinga?
We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Icinga Cloud Monitoring
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Icinga and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.