Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re reading this, chances are high you’re looking for a PRTG alternative and considering switching from Paessler PRTG to Icinga. Maybe it’s the rising costs of PRTG, or maybe you want a monitoring solution that gives you more flexibility and control. Whatever your reason, I want to give you an honest, technical perspective on what that switch entails. I’m not here to tell you PRTG is bad – far from it.

SSL/TLS certificates are critical for secure communication, and keeping track of their expiration is essential. Until now, Let’s Encrypt has sent email notifications when certificates were about to expire. However, as of June 2025, Let’s Encrypt will discontinue these expiration emails. This change could lead to expired certificates going unnoticed, potentially causing security risks and downtime.

Imagine you have one more special thing to monitor. While our Icinga 2 can observe infrastructure of almost any size, it still needs a plugin for each kind of check. Unfortunately not every command meets the monitoring plugin API: exit code 0-3 (ok, warning, critical, unknown), performance data, etc. E.g. often programs exit with 1 in case of a fatal error, which is considered just a warning by Icinga.