if one was to setup a new monitoring box, would nagios still be preferred over icinga or are they basically the same? I haven't touched Icinga, but I prefer Monit (and M/Monit) over Nagios fwiw k Personally, I would still use Nagios because it's what I know. I would do everything possible to not write config for it manually though - I'm a big fan of having your config management system build nagios config at the same time as deploying a service i was all excited about having higher upload speed, and now i have nothing to upload. monitoring solutions always seem to be a bit messy, most people go with what they're familiar with. and like plett said if you can automate config, it makes things simpler if you have a larger environment if you have smaller config and want to just check availability you may be better off using external monitoring munin is kind of nifty too Munin is decent for charting, but I find that munin-limits is somewhat terrible, primarily it's surprisingly CPU-heavy. well charting is good for passive stuff and external monitoring is good for availability i'd actually been finding smokeping kind of nifty for alerting too like if a web page loads slow I got nagios going for the most part. An annoying permission issue I can't seem to fix Apache web server: You don't have permission to access /nagios/index.php on this server. sounds like basic apache config