Icinga: Open Source Monitoring

Icinga Reporting – For Icinga-Web & Classic UI Users

Amanda Mailer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:30:22 +0000

In version 1.5, we released an Icinga Reporting Cronk pre-installed in the Icinga-Web interface. Though Icinga-Web users maybe happy, perhaps Icinga Classic users might appreciate the ability to generate flash looking reports too. Good news is, Icinga Reporting can also be used as an add-on to the JasperReports interface to edit, generate and send reports using data from the Icinga Core.

Integrating Icinga Reporting is simple, all you require is:

- a JasperReports server,

- Icinga Core with a configured MySQL database and IDOUtils enabled

- Icinga Reporting package

and the rest is very simple, as ernestoongaro shows in his Youtube webcast:

JasperReports Server with Icinga Monitoring
(Part 1: Installation)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also, for those who would like to edit the existing report templates or create their own, ernestoongaro gives a quick introduction to Jasper’s iReport WYSIWG editor:

JasperReports Server with Icinga Monitoring
(Part 2: Usage & Basic Report Development)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cheers to Ernesto for his easy-to-follow webcasts!

More information

Read more on Icinga Reporting’s features and how Icinga Reporting works. To get installation advice, see our Icinga Reporting Wiki articles.

Icinga Virtual Appliances for OpenSUSE, CentOS & Debian

David Gerbec — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:01 +0000

A while back we shared a Fedora 13 based virtual appliance for use with Virtual Box 2.2.

Times have moved on and building on user feedback, we (Team Quality Assurance & VM) now present three new virtual appliances in both VirtualBox and VMWare.

Simply download Icinga Virtual Image in your operating system of choice, and have a fully-fledged Icinga instance installed before your eyes.

Each neat little package includes your desired interface – Debian 6.0.3 (Squeeze), CentOS 6 or OpenSUSE 11.4 and…

32bit VM
Default Icinga 1.6.1 with usual plugins, IDOUtils (MYSQL) and Icinga Web 1.6.1
XFCE with auto-login
Firefox with three tabs open (README with all the login credentials, Classic UI and Icinga Web)

Requirements: Working virtualization environment (tested on Virtualbox 4.1.8 and VMWare Player 4)

Download VirtualBox VMs:
Icinga VM on Debian
Icinga VM on OpenSUSE
Icinga VM on CentOS

Download VMWare VMs:
Icinga VM on Debian
Icinga VM on OpenSUSE
Icinga VM on CentOS

NOTE: These virtual appliances are demo systems and are not intended for production environments.

The Icinga VMs can be found on our Sourceforge pages.

As always, let us know how you go with them – in the comments, on the development tracker (VM project) and on the mailing lists.

Also, kudos to Assaf Flatto, who gave me a hand and prepared the CentOS VM. He’s a great addition to the Icinga Team!

#icinga on Freenode

Matthew Brooks — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:10:36 +0000

As many of you are aware, you can visit the #icinga channel on the Freenode IRC Network to chat with fellow Icinga users and several members of the Icinga Team.

As our project gains more users who were looking for a better monitoring solution and found it in Icinga, we’ve seen the number of people hanging out in the #icinga channel cross into the three digit mark several times recently and we anticipate that 100+ users will soon be our constant.

A floor of 100+ #icinga channel users is a solid milestone and is a testiment to our having such a great community consisting of so many wonderful and dedicated people. Having this many people who share an interest in Icinga connected together is certainly a joy for us! And we’d like to thank each and every one of you for your continued participation.

Closing in on this milestone is also a good reminder that rather than it just being the handful of hackers that started the Icinga project and those of us who continue to develop it, there are many more people who rely on the #icinga channel to get help, learn more about Icinga and monitoring, or to just kick back and relax with some really smart people.

That’s why I’m pleased to announce that Icinga is now officially registered as a Freenode Group.

Our Freenode Group registration helps us to ensure that the #icinga channel will continue to be there for you and also opens the door to future possiblilities. It’s also the first step of several that are now in the early planning stages which will be focused on IRC and our community.

If you’ve never been on IRC before, or don’t have an IRC client installed just CLICK HERE to come say hello.

Team Icinga welcomes…

Amanda Mailer — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:15:09 +0000

three more monitoring aficionados to the team!

Gunnar Beutner – Core
Working behind the scenes on cool projects the likes of IDOUtils’ SLA reporting extension and IcingaMQ, Gunnar has been with us as of June 2011 and has since become a bit of a database specialist.

David Gerbec – Quality Assurance & VM
On board since December 2011, David has taken the lead on our Icinga VMs from his abode in Slovenia. A Linux systems admin with experience dating back to 1995, David is in charge of several monitoring servers Agenda Open Systems.

Assaf Flatto – Quality Assurance & VM
Assaf also joined in December 2011, though his monitoring adventures started in 2001 with Netsaint (now Nagios) and Bash for init scripts as well as minor code changes in C. In the Icinga sphere he has made feature requests, provided QA and started translating Icinga Docs into Hebrew. He too helps with the VMs, as well as IDOUtils and NRPE QA.

Both David and Assaf are the first graduates of our new Icinga Jedi Apprenticeship program, with the support of Core Jedi, Michael F. The two are currently whipping up some VM magic so keep your eyes peeled!

Icinga Build / Package Server for Debian & Ubuntu

formorer — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:30:10 +0000

Though users appreciate the thorough release and testing cycles at packages.debian.org, sometimes the latest Icinga is what you want, come what may. Indeed the current, official stable “squeeze” package for Icinga is a little behind Icinga’s fast release cycle at v1.0.2. Though more up-to-date backports are also available for “squeeze” and “lenny”, these still take some time and are dependent on us maintainers to upload to the repository.

So, to give users more flexibility, I’ve created an auto-builder that provides Debian and Ubuntu packages for Icinga: http://icingabuild.dus.dg-i.net/

You can choose from snapshot and stable builds, which are always based on the latest Icinga release – currently 1.6.1.

We recommend the stable builds (ending in –release), which are based on Debian uploads. But if you want to capture the very latest from the Debian repository, snapshot builds are available too.

To get the latest Icinga Core (Icinga Web is not included) in your desired package, just add one of the following lines to your sources list and replace $DISTRIBUTION with sid, squeeze, lenny, natty or lucid.

Snapshot build:

deb http://icingabuild.dus.dg-i.net/ icinga-$DISTRIBUTION main”

Stable build:

deb http://icingabuild.dus.dg-i.net/ icinga-$DISTRIBUTION-release main

If apt-get update fails with the improper keyring, import it with:

# wget -O – http://icingabuild.dus.dg-i.net/icinga-key.pub | apt-key add -

The curious can check the status of the build server at: http://icingabuild.dus.dg-i.net/jenkins/

A quick installation guide for IDOUtils on Debian can also be found on the Icinga Wiki.

A big thank you goes to Dembach Goo Informatik and credativ for sponsoring the build server and some of my hours at the keyboard to bring this to life.

If you encounter any package specific problems, or would like to see a distribution added – you can find me on IRC (username: formorer) or leave a message below.

Christmas Wishes

Amanda Mailer — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:00:38 +0000

If you were around the blog this time last year, you may have contributed to Icinga’s development in 2011. Indeed, we managed to tick off a few features that were on your wish lists last year. Icinga Wiki and the Icinga Web module loader were products of this; but most importantly an API for core interaction is now in progress in the form of IcingaMQ.

Seeing as the last wish list went so well, we thought we might give it a go again this year. But this time…what is at the top of your wish list for Icinga Web in 2012?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Here’s to hoping we all get what we wished for Christmas and in the next year. Till then…

Icinga Web 1.6.1 Released

Marius Hein — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:04:34 +0000

As the core team released 1.6.1, so do we. Download Icinga Web 1.6.1 on Sourceforge now. This release fixes many database related issues and in particular, resolves a authorisation dispatcher bug that hindered the import user function – cheers to user gpduck for the patch!

We also managed to slip in a new feature that should make many AD and LDAP users happy: Groups can now inherit attributes bottom-up, as well as top-down.

Fixes

JS fixes
Fixes for counts in views #2192 #2164
Translation fixes #2163 #2148
UI fixes #2162
Database fixes for oracle
Doctrine DB manager connection fixes
Doctrine count queries
Performance for TO’s and permission data
Portal cronk JS only cronk
Group manager inheritance tree and selection fix
Empty field fixes (removed caching)
Auth dispatcher fix #2142
Doctrine connection based prefix bug fix
Oracle error prone order statements

Feature

Choice of group inheritance model #2188

Thanks to all who have reported bugs and patches, we appreciate your patience in the lead up to this release. Please keep in touch on the development tracker if any more issues arise and hop onto our user mailing list, IRC channel or the Icinga-Portal.org for help.

SLA Reporting with Added Precision

Gunnar Beutner — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:22:26 +0000

If you have upgraded to Icinga Web 1.6 you may already be familiar with the new SLA extension in IDOUtils. The optional module is our response to the old niggle from the community that data written to database could be better used. So we have taken the opportunity to add a table to the database model and fiddle with IDO2DB. The end result is ‘enable_sla’ in your IDOUtils configuration files, which takes events and identifies the periods of scheduled downtime and acknowledgment for more accurate SLA reporting.

You could say, it improves SLA results too, by making it clearer, to what extent a critical event is actually critical or being resolved ;)

Coding and coordination aside, the concept behind the SLA extension is actually quite simple. We added a SLA history table to the database model, which organizes event start and end times, object id, state and state type as well as acknowledgement and scheduled downtime. Then in IDO2DB we added extra logic to write data from the core to the aforementioned table correctly.

At the moment you can view SLA data in the Icinga Web interface’s new tackle cronk, in the form of a pie chart. This is just the beginning though. We hope to integrate SLA history into Icinga Reporting with even more refined metrics.

So perhaps in the (not too far) future, you may be able to open up Icinga Reporting and call up a diagram that shows service availability for the year, though only from Monday – Friday, 9 am – 5 pm, discounting scheduled downtimes and acknowledgement periods. That maybe something worth waiting for – or even better, contributing to.

OSMC 2011 – Snaps & Slides

jmosshammer — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:36:03 +0000

A week later, we’ve finally recovered from the monitoring madness at the Open Source Monitoring Conference.

The two days were packed with lots of news around Nagios/Icinga best practices, addons and plugins, as well as Shinken and OpenNMS. It was great to hear the latest from Jörg Linge on PNP4Nagios, Michael Medin on NSClient++ and our own, Michael Lübben share tips for SLA reporting.

This was our 3rd year there, and this time round we were impressed to see many case studies feature Icinga as their chosen solution. From Müller, the drugstore chain and Deutsche Welle the broadcaster, to Hyves.nl the Dutch social network platform – Icinga has proven its worth in enterprise environments.

Our own presentation was well received, and in particular our announcement of IcingaMQ aroused much lively discussion that continued well beyond our allotted time. Other highlights from the presentation were:

Business process integration for 2012, with Bernd Strössenreuther the current Business Process Addon maintainer to join the team
New, optional IDOUtils module to utilize SLA information in database

Best of all, the event offered a great opportunity for the team to meet and release version 1.6 together, from our own Icinga development corner. We were a little tight for space this year, with Michael L, Marius, Gunnar, Ricardo, Wolfgang and myself there to represent, not to mention Rune flying in from Norway, Amanda from China and Michael F from Austria.

What can we say, we had a great time – meeting the open source monitoring community, hacking away the last bugs before release and drinking mulled wine at the Christmas market – cheers to the organizers for a great conference!

Icinga Core 1.6.1 quickfix

Michael Friedrich — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:44:47 +0000

Icinga Core 1.6.0 introduced a change on the freshness checks for passive check result and actually this lead into an unwanted bug as well as behaviour. Sorry for the inconvenience this caused for those actually having upgraded and experienced that bug. Thanks to Jörg Linge for finding the bug and all the others reporting feedback and testing the proposed fix!

Further analysis and thoughts are put into #2136, feel free to add yours too. And remember – we do need more (beta) testers to prevent such bugs in the first place! Drop us a line if you can share a test platform :-)

Icinga 1.6.1 tarball is now available for download. Packagers are already informed and will release their updates soon.