Although the Icinga 2 monitoring solution is backward-compatible to Nagios and Icinga 1, the Icinga Project considers its latest masterpiece "a league apart from its predecessors". Icinga 2 is a next-generation open-source monitoring solution designed to meet modern IT infrastructure needs. Built from scratch and based on C++, Icinga 2 boasts multi-threaded architecture for high-performance monitoring, a new dynamic configuration format and distributed monitoring out of the box. Version 2 also features multiple back ends for easy integration of popular add-ons. In contrast to its predecessors, core features and their related libraries are shipped with the application and can be activated as needed via "icinga2-enable-feature" soft link commands, easing installation and extension, enabling multi-functionality and improving performance. Additional new advancements include cluster stacks, a new object-based template-driven configuration format and extensive documentation, as well as configuration validation and syntax highlighting to support troubleshooting.
