Customer Story
Vimar
Vimar counts on Icinga to monitor a diverse IT infrastructure and ensure the reliability of business critical systems across its international operations.
Vimar is a premium Italian brand specializing in high-end electrical wiring devices, home automation systems, and smart home technology, known for its “Made in Italy” design, quality, and over 80 years of history. As a Company acknowledged as a Historic Brand of National Interest, it offers tailored solutions for residential and commercial automation, including lighting control, energy management, and security.
Vimar SpA develops and manufactures solutions for modern building infrastructure and automation. With more than 1300 employees in Italy, the company operates internationally, with products distributed in over 100 countries and 9 international business units. Revenue reached €317.4 million in 2024.
The Challenge
A heterogeneous IT environment with complex requirements
Vimar operates a heterogeneous IT landscape across different departments.
“Our IT infrastructure consists of a mix of on-premises systems, virtualized environments and a variety of business applications,” explains Mario Bisonti, Monitoring Engineer at Vimar.
To manage this environment effectively, monitoring must work consistently across different technologies while providing a unified view and reliable data collection.
Moving from reactive troubleshooting to proactive stability
When defining their new monitoring strategy, a key objective was to improve operational stability by identifying issues early and reducing the impact on business-critical systems.
“We wanted to transform our monitoring approach from reactive to truly proactive and detect early warning signals before incidents impacted operations.”
Our monitoring must reliably collect health and performance information from many types of systems.
The Solution
Icinga stood out because it offered the reliability of a Nagios-based engine combined with a more flexible architecture.
Flexible monitoring built on integration and automation
After evaluating several options, Vimar selected Icinga as the foundation of its monitoring environment.
The combination of modularity, active development and a well-documented API made Icinga a strong fit for Vimar’s requirements. The active Icinga community provides practical guidance and ready-to-use solutions for many integration scenarios. Today, the monitoring setup covers around 750 hosts and 20,000 services across servers, network devices, databases, applications and web services. The scope includes Windows systems via WMI and NRPE, Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, RedHat and SUSE, network devices via SNMP, as well as application-level checks, certificates, web services and system updates.
Scalable setup across a large and diverse environment
A key design decision was to rely on remote checks instead of deploying agents across the infrastructure. “We chose an agentless approach wherever possible because we preferred not to install additional software on monitored devices,” Bisonti explains. Monitoring data is collected using standard protocols such as SNMP and WMI, combined with passive checks and custom integrations. Automation connects monitoring with provisioning and operational workflows, allowing systems to be registered and managed as part of deployment processes. “Jenkins pipelines provision new virtual machines, interact with the Icinga API to register them, manage downtimes and trigger checks,” Bisonti says.
The Business Process module enables teams to model service dependencies and understand how issues impact higher level services, improving troubleshooting and prioritization. Targeted notifications ensure that incidents are routed to the responsible IT teams, improving coordination and reducing response times. Additional modules such as Director, Graphite, InfluxDB and Fileshipper support configuration management, performance analysis and data integration. Vimar follows an iterative approach, continuously extending monitoring by testing plugins, adapting scripts and rolling out coverage step by step. As part of ongoing innovation, the team is exploring AI driven reporting via the MCP interface to generate automated monitoring summaries.
The platform supports a wide range of technologies while maintaining consistency in configuration and monitoring logic.
Success
Centralized visibility and improved operational stability
Icinga provides a centralized view across the entire infrastructure, enabling teams to assess system health and respond more effectively. “The biggest success has been achieving full centralized visibility across our entire infrastructure,” says Bisonti. This visibility enables earlier detection of issues and contributes to more stable operations.
Increased efficiency through automation and standardization
Monitoring is now integrated into daily operations and supported by standardized processes and automation.
“We now work with automated processes, rule-based service definitions and standardized checks that drastically reduce manual configuration,” Bisonti explains. Operational effort has been reduced while system reliability has improved. He concludes that “Icinga allowed us to significantly improve service uptime and reduce operational overhead by automating monitoring and enabling proactive incident prevention.”
Looking ahead
Vimar continues to evolve its monitoring capabilities alongside its IT landscape. With a strong focus on automation, integration and innovation, the company plans to further expand its use of Icinga, deepen its automation workflows and explore advanced use cases such as AI driven reporting. This ensures that monitoring remains a key enabler for reliable and scalable operations in the future.
Monitoring has become a strategic asset instead of a background technical activity.
Outcomes
- Centralized monitoring across a heterogeneous IT environment
- Agentless monitoring using SNMP WMI and passive checks
- Integration with automation workflows via Icinga API
- Scalable setup with 750 hosts and 20,000 services
- Improved uptime and reduced operational overhead
- Transition from reactive to proactive monitoring
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