Open Source Monitoring
We’ve just released the first beta version of Icinga and just a couple of hours later, the first version for Mac OS X is online. Thank you for this excellent work. You can download Icinga 0.8.0 for Leopard here.
P.S. There is also a Nagios Version for Mac available.
Hello out there,
we are proud to announce the first beta release of Icinga.
As mentioned on the roadmap , we have reached the renaming goal. But is just a simple renaming takes so much time? Well, no!
It was kind of fun to re-factor the IDOUtils to use libdbi as a DB abstraction layer, that we decided to get these changes into the 0.8 release instead of holding it back to 0.8.2. Up to now it should work well with MySQL Databases and current discussions on the icinga-devel list shows that there’s enough work to change the different SQL queries to fit to more RDBMs.
Also new are some neat style sheet changes based on the Vautour Theme (Link to MonitoringExchange)
Work has just begun and we hope for many feedback, preferred on the mailings lists.
You don’t have to buy a pig in the poke, just watch the Icinga live demo on: http://demo.icinga.org/icinga/ (Username: guest; Password: guest) and if you like it, try it by yourself after downloading from Sourceforge
Team Icinga proudly presents first impressions of the upcoming web interface and Icinga-API. Right now both projects are still under heavy development but from now on impatient ones can take a glance. :)
The web interface is written in PHP5 and uses Agavi as MVC framework. You can simply integrate Icinga addons into the frontend since it is possible to add them as modules.
Authentication against LDAP, HTTP basic auth and a native database is already implemented and ready to use, just as with user roles and access rights.
Use of Ajax elements is pre-implemented and features like auto completion will take massive advantage of it.
Next step of the frontend is support of native views just as Nagios provides them.
Icinga-API is able to provide data via Icinga’s IDO right now. The API is also written in PHP5 and does not use any external frameworks since it is supposed to be and to stay independent from any other software.
Feel free to take a look at the document Base Architecture to see how the API will work when its done. Very abstract explained, the API will be your interface to fetch data from and to send data to Icinga.
Coders can have a look at the documentation directory of the source tree where API classes and methods and several examples are waiting to be explored and discussed, of course.
Right now we’re implementing and testing file access to provide data without any need of an IDO.
Fetch your previews from our GIT repositories.
Command-line examples for…
…web interface: git clone git://git.icinga.org/icinga-web.git
…Icinga-API: git clone git://git.icinga.org/icinga-api.git
Have fun and give us feedback! :)
Like Hendrik promised yesterday we want to open our tracking-system to the public, to give ”everybody” a chance to contribute and send a patch- or featurerequest.
This is done now and you can reach the tracker on our development-platform. All steps needed for issue creation are documented in our development-wiki.
Feel free to send us your feedback, bugs and ideas to make Icinga more better.
One point Icinga stands for is the wish to be more open. And we will release the CORE git earlier than we planned to.
Icinga is split up to three sub-projects, the core, the web and the api and now we opened one of the three doors for public review – the core door.
See it on:
Git: git clone git://git.icinga.org/icinga-core.git
What has already been done?
We began our fork on the latest Nagios 3.1.0 code, changed the default values for the check_for_updates() stuff to ‘disabled’, included the IDOUtils (NDOUtils) to the tree but made them optional during the compile/installation progress.
The IDOUtils Code was changed to use libdbi (http://libdbi.sourceforge.net) as a C API database abstraction layer. So we should be more database independent. The big goal on this: “If you get libdbi and your favourite db driver to work, ido2db should work also.”
Tests against a MySQL database were successfull so far, but I guess we can do more on it.
If you would try it, you have to enable it during the configure part with the “–enable-idoutils” switch.
You can review the latest tracking items on: https://dev.icinga.org/projects/show/icinga-core.
I hope that we are able to open the tracker to public as soon as possible. Until then we will parse the icinga-devel list for issues and bugs and transfer them to the tracker manually.
Happy testing.
This doesn’t always relates to death.
Even if the topic on the Nagios-devel mailings list sounds like, Nagios is not dead and I am very happy to see that the community isn’t too.
There were many discussions, many questions but also many offers to help out.
I don’t see Icinga as an enemy for Nagios, or Ethan Galstad or his Company. Icinga is more an alternative way to do things different than they were done in the past. But the announcement last Wednesday and the discussion after shows clearly: Nagios and the community behind it is not dead.
As some of you might know, I did some bugfix contributions to Nagios in the past, spent lots of hours in the German community to help others to start with Nagios and many more. I would say for myself that I’m a community guy and I’m not interested in taking over Nagios, attack it in a commercial way or something similar. I’m interested in not to loose such a great software and I respect Ethan’s work on it in the past 10 years.
But why are we doing what we are doing? Why such a hard slap in his face and why all this so suddenly?
Even if Ethan didn’t wants to, he did some things in the past behind closed doors. Some of those things result in rumours, frustrations and misunderstandings. Misunderstandings are sad because they often show general lack of communication.
I think it’s funny but also sad that we weren’t talking to Ethan before this big bang as he didn’t talk to us about his reasons being disappeared. A colleague, may be a friend of mine told me on Friday evening, that we all are human beings and we’re going to make mistakes, that’s quite normal. The question is how to handle such mistakes in the future.
If we divide the big problem into smaller ones, as we are doing it in the IT business, one point of criticism is the bottleneck during the Nagios development cycle.
There are rumours, and I believe that there is something behind, that Ethan will change this bottleneck in the near future.
It’s a very good thing! If we think about what Ethan has to do all the time, development, supporting customers to earn money, discussing bugs, patches a.s.o. I guess that he needs a time machine to blow up his day to 48 hours.
Working in a team is more difficult than working alone, you have to think about a strategy, discuss and control it. The benefit for this overhead is to get more capacities to delegate the work on. This ensures that things are going on.
I am curios to see what will happen on that level. But for the moment things are just discussing for changes and I have to wait until the changes are going over to a hard state. I really hope for a HARD OK. :-)
A group of leading Nagios protagonists including members of the Nagios Community Advisory board and creators of multiple Nagios Addons have launched Icinga – a fork of Nagios, the prevalent open source monitoring system. This independent project strives to be more responsive to user requests and faster in software development through the support of a broader developer community.
The new open source monitoring system will be fully compatible with its predecessor, retaining all the existing Nagios features while adding new features requested by the Nagios user community. Long standing bugs will be removed and improvements will be made, especially for the database integration alongside a standardised API to simplify the integration of 3rd party addons. Icinga will also be developed to include an improved functionality in large and complex environments.
Built on proven technologies and concepts as well as progressive frameworks and standards, Icinga is a product of the community – their ideas, needs and combined passion for innovation.
Icinga takes all the great features of Nagios and combines it with the feature requests and patches of the user community. These modifications hail direct from the community and are supported by the concrete experiences of those involved in customer projects.
The first releases are expected for the end of May. The first stable Version is scheduled for October 28th.
