Last updated: 05.03.2026
This blog post explains whether Icinga is free. As I sit here and start writing this blog post, I still can’t believe that today is about this topic.
Is Icinga free of charge? For me, as someone who has been involved with open source software for almost 25 years now (yes, I’m old!), this question seems strange and yet the topic is interesting. As obvious as the answer to this is for me, the figures, data and facts from the usual analytics tools are just as clear. The search for the costs of Icinga and the question of whether the tool is “free” keeps hundreds of people busy every month.
Is Icinga free of charge? The compact answer!
For those who don’t want to read any further: Yes, Icinga is essentially free to use. You can download the monitoring software and use it without any license costs! Although there are fee-based services (e.g. B. Support contracts and subscriptions), through which service providers like us and of course Icinga itself earn money, but these are not mandatory.
If you want to use Icinga free of charge, you can do so at any time and you will get far without the paid offers. Very far indeed.
The Icinga project provides ready-to-use packages for some widely used Linux distributions (e.g. Debian and Ubuntu) free of charge. An Icinga subscription is required for packages of Enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL, SLES, Amazon Linux) and for certain Icinga modules (Icinga Dependency Views). This is all included in Icinga support contracts.
The Icinga Developer Subscription
The Developer Subscription is aimed at individuals or companies who want to use Icinga in small environments. The Developer Subscription gives you access to the otherwise fee-based repository with the packages for the Enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL, SLES, Amazon Linux). This goes up to 20 hosts (physical and virtual).
More and detailed information can be found here at Icinga itself.
The Icinga support contract
A support contract is not absolutely necessary for the pure operation of Icinga. However, as soon as you are working in a large, complex or highly available (HA) environment or with satellites, professional support is recommended.
While small Icinga setups with just one Icinga server are completely sufficient in small IT environments, there are many dependencies and much more “impact” in large environments. In a large IT environment, you are flying blind in the event of faults without monitoring and quickly lose track of the current status.
A support contract gives you access to rapid assistance in the event of a fault. Experience has shown that failures are not always due to the software. It can happen that an Icinga server is “down” and a human has caused the problem. Be it through incorrect operation of the software or by the cleaner who accidentally pulled the plug in the data center 😉
For such cases, we offer a support contract with three support levels together with Icinga. Roughly speaking, these depend on the number of Icinga servers and the service level. We have been operating and maintaining Icinga environments in small and large enterprise setups for many years and support customers in setting up highly available monitoring architectures.
Conclusion
To summarize: Icinga is an open source monitoring solution that can be used free of charge. Costs are only incurred for optional subscriptions or support services.
Which variant makes sense depends heavily on the size and criticality of your environment. If you have any further questions or need support, please send an email to sales@netways.de, use our contact form or call our sales team.
