Open Source Monitoring

Are YOU Using Icinga?

Published on 23. July 2010 in Development and Misc. 4 Comments Tags: community, Users.

Today we have over 17.000 downloads at Sourceforge. We all enjoy the great and growing feedback on Icinga and would like to introduce YOU, the Icinga-Users to each other.

To make this happen, we would like you to send (info at icinga.org) us your story. Tell us about your reasons and experiences using Icinga and what you are doing with it.

If possible please include the following information:

Your Name
Your Company
Some words on you experience
Your Logo if possible

At the moment we are working hard on the next release, so stay tuned!

Icinga Chromed Status for Google Chrome/Chromium

Published on 16. July 2010 in Misc. 2 Comments

Do you use Google Chrome/Chromium web browser? if so… do you also manage your Icinga services? Well there is a new add-on extension that will make your life just that little bit more easier! its called Icinga Chromed Status by kepicz

Firstly this is only available for the Google Chrome & Chromium browser!

Get a copy of this extension here

Once you have it installed the configuration is fairly straight forward…

Configuration

Simply add a valid Username & Password, and then the full URL to the status.cgi (https://your.domain/icinga/cgi-bin/status.cgi) then once you have entered this information you will be updated on the current health of your Icinga service. See below for the different views available…

Overview

Gives you a quick visual on where you may be having some trouble.

Hosts

Gives you a visual on the health of your hosts.

Services

Gives a visual on the health of your services.

About

A little about the author.

This is a great addition to your Google Chrome/Chromium browser and we thank kepicz for his efforts thus far!

RELEASED: Icinga 1.0.2 & Web 1.0.1

Published on 30. June 2010 in API, Core, IDOUtils, Releases and Webinterface. 8 Comments Tags: 1.0.1, 1.0.2, Download, Icinga, release.

A new release, a new level of performance – Icinga 1.0.2 promises to be faster and well on the way to being fully robust. This release unifies the Core, API and Docs to version 1.0.2 with Web out of beta and into 1.0.1. Have a look below to see what’s been keeping us busy the last 60 or so days:

Web/Api/Docs

Core code reduced and made more robust
Core code detached to its owning modules
Module framework defined, extractor and installer
Principals now works in one step (one function code)
Instances included
Ajax driven filters, made some new filters
REST/Json api interface (web/api, https://dev.icinga.org/issues/305)
New summary cronk (faster, faster, faster)
New cronk list (also categories, faster, faster, faster)
Single click in the web interface
UI Translation (not complete)
Docs translations (not complete)
Docs can now be converted into .pdf

Core/CGIs/IDOUtils

Schedule Downtime for host and all services now works as expected
Servicechecks with excluded timeperiods are correctly re-scheduled
Fixes for Notification not/incorrectly being sent/calculated
Error out if service_description is missing in service definition
Added syslogd local facility
Use execv for active checks w/o metacharacters
Speed up loading retention.dat into the Core
Initscripts handle the lock file now correctly and outputs config errors
Add event profiling option and dumping entire scheduling queue
display_name on host/service defs displayed in classical UI (CGIs)
multiple urls for notes|action_url on host/service defs in classical UI
Resolved performance issues in IDOUtils, improved SQL queries and upgrade scripts

There was a long list of pending patches on the mailing lists and trackers, so check the changelog for more. As always, your feedback is welcome and we hope you like it!

You can also check out the new features in our updated Demo-System.

News from Core, CGIs & IDOUtils – Part III

Published on 24. June 2010 in Core, Development, IDOUtils and Technical. 0 Comments Tags: 1.0.2, cgi, Core, Development, git, Icinga, IDOUtils, release, Support, testing.

Now that you have read about IDOUtils and the CGIs, it is time for the big one :-)

Icinga Core

All changes, fixes and enhancements do not affect compatibility to Nagios ™ – you’ll just get more fixes and enhancements if you decide to move over to Icinga.

The list of fixes and code improvements is rather long thanks to Andreas Ericsson who is working on his own Nagios ™ development branches. All those recent commits have been reworked into Icinga Core (if not already done). There were some nifty patches making developers life more easy and the source code a bit more readable and reusable.

Furthermore protection against typos in macro names has been added next to missing NOTIFICATIONISESCALATED macro. Performance data files are now closed correctly and the pipes are also set properly on configuration re-read.

SIGSEGV in checks on Solaris have been fixed thanks to Thorsten Huebler. There are also some other fixes for Solaris which are currently in development (thanks Alexander Skwar).

The fix by Ton Voon for choosing next valid time on day of DST change when clocks go one hour backwards is also in 1.0.2.

Next to that Ton Voon provided the in sync retention facility on the core by Opsera Ltd which has been reworked into Icinga – we think this might be useful. Also, there was a Nagios ™ patch for adding new is_volatile setting of 2 for services, which respects the re-notification interval for notifications which also can be found applied and tested in Icinga Core.

There was a bug removing comments – now it is fixed and removing one comment will not remove all of them.

Scheduling a downtime for all services and the host now works as expected. Also custom notifications are not sent anymore during downtimes (thanks Sven Nierlein). notification_period inheritance for services has been fixed using a patch by Gordon Messmer.

Notifications not being sent out when scheduled downtime is cancelled is also fixed next to the fix for first notification delay being calculated incorrectly causing notifications potentially going out early.

The initscript has been slightly reworked in order to show config errors as an own option. Furthermore the output is saved into a file which will can be looked up after a normal start. The initscript also does not remove the pid file anymore if Icinga did not stop in a timely manner. If a lockfile without running PID is found during startup, it will be removed instead of bailing out.

Starting the Core now throws an error if contactgroups are not matching. This happens now too if a service description is missing on a service object definition (if defined in used template there won’t be an error!).

Servicechecks with timeperiods containing ‘exclude’ directives are now correctly re-scheduled – this is noted in Nagios ™ Changelog for 3.4 and will be fixed in Icinga 1.0.2.

Steven D. Morrey implemented a patch for an extended scheduling queue which has been slightly reworked and improved for Icinga. The -S option functions much like -s but will dump the entire scheduling queue is it would run, in addition to providing the summary data.

Steven also created another patch long time ago – adding an event profiling option for stats of event counts and time taken for events. We integrated that as a config option in icinga.cfg and took the chance to add those stats to the current CGIs in ‘Performance Info’ – in case the option is enabled of course.

We finally implemented the state-based escalation ranges feature by Mark Gius: “The directives first_notification and last_notification apply to the total count of notifications on a particular service or host. It is sometimes desirable to escalate after the Nth critical notification, rather than after a total number of N notifications have been sent.”

Max Schubert’s patch to add enhanced diagnostic output when a regular expression fails to compile also has been added to Icinga.

There have been questions about another syslog facility – Icinga can now send log messages to syslogd using a local facility instead of the default one. If enabled you can chose between 0 to 7.

Currently Icinga uses popen and system to run active check commands with shell intepretation. If using execv instead so there won’t be no shell expansion required. This means that 1 less process (sh) is required to execute an active check, which should give a performance improvement. When running the active check, check if there are any shell metacharacters. If there are, fallback to the shell invocation. Otherwise use the new execv method.

We had a speedup of parsing status.dat a while ago, now Matthieu Kermagoret provided another patch for minimizing loading time of the retention file. From his reports, they used a standard setup with 1500 hosts, 19000 services and around 80 000 comments – before the restart took 20 minutes. Having the patch applied, only 2.6 seconds (!).

Icinga Core, CGIs & IDOUtils fit perfectly together with Docs, the API and the new Web. Please help us test for the upcoming release on 30.6.2010 (counter is GMT+1) and report issues !!! :-)

Interested in Icinga development and (re-)implement features and resolve performance issues? – Then please get in touch:

* Mailinglists

* IRC: irc.freenode.net #icinga #icinga-devel

* Icinga Portal

* Twitter

News from Core, CGIs & IDOUtils – Part II

Published on 21. June 2010 in Core, Development, IDOUtils, Misc, Releases and Technical. 0 Comments Tags: 1.0.2, cgi, Core, Development, Icinga, IDOUtils, release, testing.

Part II of this series catches up on our work on the CGIs – what happened with them since 1.0.1?

Icinga CGIs

Next to the new Icinga web there was some space to fix and enhance the current classical UI (“the CGIs”).

Some minor typo fixes reported by community users have been applied, missing js files have been added and the check_daemon_running function has been modified in order to work with MacOSX again.

The quick search has been added again next to the live search (which is now called “extended search”). During a research on older patches it came up that if a user is authorized for a host all service authorizations views are derived from that. If you don’t want that you can now modify show_all_services_host_is_authorized_for in cgi.cfg to 0 (only if the user is not globally allowed to view all services).

The docs mentioned that display_name on host and service definition would fulfill another displayed name on the classical UI. This is now available exclusively to Icinga in 1.0.2 – if you don’t set display_name, the default host_name/service_description will be used instead.

Thanks to Jochen Bern from LINworks GmbH the CGIs now allow adding multiple urls for notes|action_url on host|service object definition – if you ever needed more of them (like me) :-)

Stay tuned for Part III – it will catch up on Icinga Core – and a lot of things to talk about =)

News from Core, CGIs & IDOUtils – Part I

Published on 16. June 2010 in Core, Development, IDOUtils, Misc, Releases and Technical. 1 Comment Tags: 1.0.2, cgi, Core, Icinga, IDOUtils, release, testing.

Hi there,

it’s been a while since recent release of 1.0.1 in March. Quite a lot of things happened – Hiren Patel and Massimo Forni joined the Core developer team while Hendrik moved on to new projects. But not only refreshening the team makes Icinga Core, CGIs & IDOUtils more valuable this time.

Regarding the GIT commit history and the issue roadmap for 1.0.2 you can imagine the evolution – but this is just an historical listing and does only show basic “who did commit and fix/create what on which date”.

Today Icinga will be “feature frozen” and is up for testing – we need testers for the upcoming Icinga release !!! Guides are available within our development wiki :-)

What exactly happened since 1.0.1?

Many people were asking what exactly changed in Icinga on the core side – in an easy and readable way. So let’s try it here in 3 Parts :-)

The changes and enhancements will be split into the Core itsself, the CGIs and the IDOUtils – all of them more or less historically summarized.

Part I starts with …

Icinga IDOUtils

There were some bugs, one major causing data inconsistency but also some enhancements regarding usage and performance.

The current database schema implies a centralized view on the objects table on which all relations are built and joined. During startup of Icinga Core normally old configs get deleted and existing objects marked as inactive. After that, the new config is being checked against those objects and if none found, a new one inserted. This is the expected behavior but a bug leading from the libdbi rewrite caused this check to fail and always inserting a new object. This caused an explosion of the objects table and decreasing overall performance on select/update roundtrips.

Thanks to William Preston the source is fixed, and the remaining data inconsistency with active and inactive objects related to historical checks in the RDBMS also has been fixed. Within the docs you will find a more detailed description and upcoming 1.0.2 will include upgrade SQL scripts in order to keep your database consistency!

Next to that, the string escaping has been modified again not to provoke any more errors. Some RDBMS specific fixes on wrong datatypes were added to.

The source has now completely been rewritten (s/ndo/ido/) and in order to keep everything clean, the core neb api now provides an Icinga specific object version which is used in IDOMOD 1.0.2. The old Nagios ™ one has been kept for compatibility. This implies upgrading both, Core and IDOUtils in 1.0.2.

Another performance issue on MySQL – the binary selects were a nice idea but resulting in major memory and performance problems. Just for getting case-sensitive compare this can be resolved defining the correct collation on the affected columns – thanks again William Preston.

The internal linked hash list for objects has been extended in order to minimize objects selects. This increases overall performance a bit – thanks Opsera Ltd for their Altinity patch.

Some SELECT queries asked for all columns instead of just the primary key if they were just checking for an existing row. Altering this minimizes overall unused RDBMS traffic.

IDO2DB now writes to syslog if it fails to connect to the RDBMS or if the database schema cannot be accessed – and not just quitting without error.

The IDO2DB initscript has been rewritten not to depend only on the lockfile (just like Icinga Core) and if the startup fails this will be shown too, also removing the lockfile.

Jan Drogi (ja5kier on irc.freenode.net #icinga) was asking about persistent configuration during a core restart where IDOUtils clean the config by default – e.g. to keep custom variables relations. Therefore 2 new config options for ido2db.cfg have been added: clean_realtime_tables_on_core_startup and clean_config_tables_on_core_startup. If set to 0 no startup cleaning will be performed.

Stay tuned fo the second part of this series! Meanwhile keep on testing :-)

Icinga at the Nagios Workshop

Published on 8. June 2010 in Development, Events and Releases. 0 Comments Tags: Reporting, Workshop.

Sound’s weird, but it is not. This year’s workshop of the German Nagios community took place in Nuremberg.

Beside a lot of other interesting projects around Nagios, the Icinga team had a chance to share our latest developments. Starting with a short status update of all project parts it was also a chance to give the audience a first impression of the upcoming reporting implementation.

Icinga Reporting is based on the IDO backend and just like the core, it will support all major database platforms. You can download all templates and the actual servlet implementation in our Git.

There was a lot of positive feedback and also a lot of ideas for the coming months until our final release in October. You can download the presentation here. Enjoy!

YouTube: Icinga vs Nagios – What’s the difference?

Published on 25. May 2010 in Misc. 6 Comments Tags: icinga vs nagios, webcast, youtube.

Yep, we did it. We’ve finally tackled it head on and answered that nagging question – What’s the difference between Icinga and Nagios?

Indeed a year on, Icinga has ascended above the status of a mere fork. After implementing 400+ patches, bug fixes and feature requests, as well as a flexible API based system architecture – Icinga is now a piece of monitoring software to reckon with.

See for yourself, the differences in the system architecture, web interface, addon development style and above all the team and community that are behind it – on YouTube!

Roadmap and Upcoming Versions

Published on 21. May 2010 in Releases and Technical. 0 Comments Tags: Final, Roadmap.

This week we finalized our release plan for the next few months. So far everything is going to plan, and we are on our way to shipping a unified, final version of Icinga Web, Core and Documentation in early October.

There will be additional releases in June and an intermediate version in August.

1.0.2 – 30 June 2010
1.0.3 – 18 August 2010
1.0.4 (unified stable release) – 6 October 2010

Hand in hand with the active community, contributors, our new team members and yourself, we will sprint to the finish line next month to extend and stabilize Icinga - and take it to the next level.

Check out our development system to follow our day-to-day progress.

Team Icinga welcomes new members

Published on 18. May 2010 in Misc. 1 Comment Tags: team.

Icinga has been growing and in just the last three months we are proud to welcome 4 new faces to the Icinga team.

Joining in March, Alexander Wirt has offered to support the Icinga Core development team and maintain the official Debian Packages for Icinga alongside Nagios.

As of April, Jannis Mosshammer joined the Icinga Web & API development team, specializing in the module loader architecture. He has already developed Icinga’s first module – Heatmap for Icinga and a module loader howto describing how to create an
Icinga-module and setting it up for automatic installation. We’re happy to have him on board with his extensive experience in modern web architecture and underlying framework like Agavi.

Hailing from South Africa, Hiren Patel joined Icinga core to share his Perl and new found C programming skills.

Finally just this month, Massimo Forni too came on board the Icinga Core team to lend a helping hand with his C, Perl and Python expertise from his vantage point in Italy.

We give a big shout out to the new Icingies who we’re very excited to have with us, and swing the doors wide open for anymore fans who might want to actively support the coolest monitoring software on the planet. :-)

Icinga