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.

When working with systemd services in Linux, you might encounter situations where multiple instances of a service need to be managed dynamically. When I had to develop a solution to monitor multiple Kubernetes clusters with Icinga for Kubernetes, I ran into exactly this challenge.

The fundamentals of Icinga 2 are check plugins. They are being executed and their return value is mapped to either Host or Service objects. Everything else follows on top. These check plugins can be either from the Monitoring Plugins or custom. While their origin does not matter, they are the building blocks of an Icinga monitoring stack. If a plugin goes CRITICAL, Icinga 2 alerts the sysadmin.

Today we are happy to announce that we released Icinga for Windows v1.13.0 a couple of days ago. We have already talked about the changes coming to v1.13.0 with the beta blog-post last year in more depth, and will focus only on some core changes here.

Icinga is an open-source project, but it’s only become the product we like to use thanks to co-development, brainstorming and suggestions from the community. That’s why we created a platform in the past to facilitate the exchange of custom implementations like check plug-ins, styles, extensions and bridges to third-party systems. We’re talking about our Exchange Portal, of course.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are moving their operations to the cloud more than ever before. This shift brings incredible benefits like scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. While it does introduce various common cloud monitoring challenges, there are effective solutions that organizations can implement to ensure optimal performance, security, and cost control.

In the area of IT infrastructure management, three terms often surface: observability, monitoring, and telemetry. These concepts, while interconnected, each play a unique role in maintaining system health and performance. Observability, monitoring, and telemetry form the backbone of any robust IT environment. Yet, their differences and interrelations can sometimes blur, leading to confusion. This article aims to demystify these terms, providing clarity on their distinct roles and how they work together.

In this post we will take a look at the icingadb check command built into Icinga 2 for monitoring the health of Icinga DB. If you have already configured it, this blog post will give you some insights on what it actually checks, otherwise, it showcases what useful health checks you are missing out on and should serve as a motivation to enable the check.