Partner Success Story
Shadow-Soft
Shadow-Soft is an implementation and consulting partner that helps organizations across North America deploy and customize Icinga. They resell Icinga support and services, providing customers with a local, trusted point of contact in the region.
The partnership between Shadow-Soft and Icinga began in 2015 at PuppetConf – a fitting environment for two companies rooted in automation and open-source technology. At the time, Shadow-Soft had no dedicated platform for enterprise infrastructure monitoring and was looking for a solution that aligned with its principles and its customers’ needs. Icinga quickly stood out.
“We realized we had a gap in our portfolio. Icinga was open source first, extensible, and fit perfectly with our ethos,” recalls Nick Marcarelli, Vice President of Shadow-Soft. “It just clicked.” The teams connected immediately, and Shadow-Soft became Icinga’s first partner in North America. Establishing the partnership was straightforward and smooth, despite the geographical distance. “All the things that normally make international partnerships complicated were surprisingly easy.”
The Challenge
People think Icinga is for small shops because it’s open source. We disagree. The biggest value is in the enterprise.
Why Icinga Was the Right Fit
Before working with Icinga, Shadow-Soft saw a fragmented monitoring landscape: highly specialized tools on one side and APM platforms on the other, but few solutions that could serve as a scalable enterprise strategy. Icinga’s open architecture, flexibility and strong integration options presented the missing layer.
For Shadow-Soft, this meant offering customers a monitoring platform that could grow with their environment, integrate cleanly with automation and CI/CD pipelines, and avoid the limitations of rigid vendor ecosystems. The company began delivering consulting, deployments and official Icinga training. For several years Shadow-Soft also provided Level 1 and Level 2 support for the North American region – a process that has since evolved. Today, Shadow-Soft advises customers and sells support contracts, while the actual technical support is handled directly by Icinga’s engineering team in Germany.
The Solution
Supporting Large Enterprise Environments
Shadow-Soft today works primarily with large enterprises operating significant on-premises infrastructure and global data centers. Typical customer environments begin around 2,000 hosts and scale up to tens of thousands of services. In these setups, Icinga’s architectural flexibility and predictable subscription model are key advantages.
Customers especially appreciate Icinga’s declarative approach to monitoring. “With other tools, auto-discovery often creates noise. With Icinga, customers define what matters. It keeps operations clean and focused,” says Marcarelli. This emphasis on clarity and control is particularly valuable in complex environments with distributed teams and mission-critical workloads.
Our customers start with a few thousand hosts and scale up fast. Icinga keeps pace without missing a beat.
Integrations That Matter in Practice
Shadow-Soft frequently integrates Icinga with Ansible for automation, Grafana and InfluxDB for visualization and performance data, and ServiceNow or PagerDuty for incident workflows. Customers value the ability to combine Icinga with the tools they already use and to extend the platform through open APIs and community integrations.
“Customers love that Icinga plays well with the tools they rely on every day. Even community integrations provide a strong starting point,” Marcarelli notes. This openness supports diverse operational workflows and fits well with Shadow-Soft’s focus on enterprise open source.
Enterprise Features and Subscriptions
The Icinga Repository Subscription has become an important element for customers who rely on standardized, secure and high-quality packages. In addition, enterprise modules and enhancements – such as the Dependency Views – can now be purchased individually or in a bundle alongside the Repository Subscription. These offerings help organizations operate Icinga more efficiently and scale with confidence.
“Could customers build their own packages? Sure. Should they? No. The subscription saves enormous time and demonstrates maturity,” says Marcarelli. Enterprise-only features and add-ons strengthen long-term stability and ensure that customers can rely on a continuously evolving platform.
Could customers build their own packages? Sure. Should they? No, the subscription saves enormous time.
Success
Being the go-to Icinga contact in North America opened doors to customers we would never have reached.
Impact on Shadow-Soft’s Business
Being the primary point of contact for Icinga in North America has brought Shadow-Soft into collaboration with well-known enterprises looking to advance their monitoring capabilities. “It’s been incredible. One of the best investments we’ve made as a company,” Marcarelli says. The partnership has strengthened Shadow-Soft’s position in competitive markets and expanded its service portfolio with consulting, architecture design and training offerings built around Icinga.
Looking Ahead
Despite widespread digital transformation, many organizations – including large enterprises – still lack a clear monitoring strategy. “We’re surprised every day by how many big companies still haven’t solved this. There is so much more to do,” says Marcarelli. With Icinga’s evolving roadmap and a strong joint approach, Shadow-Soft expects the partnership to continue growing and to support more organizations in modernizing their infrastructure operations.
Outcomes
- 10-year partnership built on shared open-source principles
- Strong growth through new enterprise customers
- Extensive experience with large-scale deployments
- Clear joint vision for expanding enterprise monitoring in North America
Tackle Your Monitoring Challenge
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