Icinga introduces… Michael Friedrich (Icinga Core and IDOUtils)

Day job: I am working at the Vienna University Computer Center at the Internet Domain Administration department.  My daily work consists of administrating and monitoring DNS services for *.at and the Vienna University. Furthermore I am in charge of several (DNS) Monitoring projects. One of them is the database backend for Icinga Core, named IDOUtils and supporting Oracle/Postgresql.

Which part of Icinga could you put your name on?
Especially IDOUtils and all 3 RDBMS (MySQL, Postgres, Oracle). Regarding the core I am at a fast growing learning stage, but my main focus is on IDOUtils. And if you wanna know, the Postgres and Oracle implementation was running through my fingers and always will be ;-)

What are you currently working on?
Having finished improved Oracle implementation for IDOUtils and finishing the threaded housekeeper from Hendrik, I am currently working on getting the last patches and enhancements into the Core and IDOUtils. I will be in charge of doing the release 1.0.1 on the technical point of view.

Afterwards, Icinga will get deployed onto a productive environment. Other things next to Icinga are kept confidential, but regarding Icinga IDOUtils there might be the chance to improve Postgresql just like I did with Oracle. And on the core side of life I want to see more community patches being applied :)

What attracted you to Icinga?
In the first time the only plan was to get former and now closed NDOUtils Oracle project back to the upstream. In April 2009 I got into that project and I also read about the fork and the ongoing development (and also about the discussions about dead Nagios development).It was a wise and logical decision to catch up with Icinga and to offer IDOUtils Oracle.

In the meantime – after several philosophical sessions with Hendrik – I started coding then and back in August 2009 initial Postgres support has been done. For my work schedule it was only a small step into Oracle direction, but imho a real nice community output :)

What do you enjoy about working on the project?
Getting the Oracle stuff done was a bit harder to keep up with but getting my time alone and several weekends with too much coffee and good music … Anyhow, I really enjoy coding and listening to Tiesto or Armin van Buuren. Most of my initial inspiration and motivation for coding sessions comes from there.

But hey .. I also like to get in touch with the others, looking over their stuff and commits (and to be honest icinga web is a black hole for me). And I like that community feeling… if something is wrong or fresh ideas pop up – No negative auras or words at all. Just like a positive flow and regarding the results – what the heck were we doing in our spare time?

What was one big challenge or memorable moment while on the Icinga team?
Big Challenge: Release of Icinga Core 1.0RC1 and Web 0.9.0-alpha during OSMC. Pure chaos but I liked it … not always the coding stuff but also getting things together and “play” project release manager. The toughest one was the upload of the web – at night after the evening event nobody was online and I was able to upload it to SF.net at 5 a.m. ;-)
Other Challenges were coding with Antibiotika and getting Postgres as a result. And finally Oracle of course.

Memorable moment: Since I am the only one from Vienna, Austria the only thing we had to communicate was Skype and Emails. I got ill the week before the Icinga Weekend and so meeting all Icinga members after arriving somewhere in Nuremberg was a real pleasure. It was like never seen before but we were behaving like old friends getting together after a long time. Such memories keep me running and afterall we will meet again and get our ideas together :-)

Outside of Icinga, what are some of your other pet projects?
Some internal projects concerning DNS in general, based on C and Perl. And the usual work stuff – setting up nameservers and administrating dns related stuff. My work is not really related to my former studies except coding C (but not on hardware anymore).

What would you bet to be the next big thing in the open source or IT world?
Difficult to say. What I can tell – definitely not inserting dollars for a bundled monitoring toolkit and getting a new webinterface and reporting. Not the way the open source thoughts should spread the word.

I am hoping more people will recognize Icinga. Everyone who ever wanted their patches in the upstream is very welcome to contribute. Or even support the team with active development. Remember – it’s free and a community project…

How do you like to spend your time away from the keyboard and monitor?
Uhm there is? Well at this stage 50 hours or more a week are enough, you are right. I really enjoy spending time with friends, enjoying a glass of good  whiskey and sitting back, doing nothing work related of course. If I’ll need to get into my own world, I’m reading Perry Rhodan books. And I really like to watch series like How I met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two and A Half Men, and so on :) Sometimes a good movie, or going out together. But I’m kind of a workaholic, that’s true ;-)

What’s your two cents on Icinga?
1 cent: Best thing ever happened to me at work. Will continue developing and deploying it at work.

1 cent: Spread the word for all addon and plugin developers and also the community out there to join forces :-)

All together like we thought on OSMC 2009 right before the presentation of Icinga: “If we were not here in this place, working on and enjoying Icinga, others would have done it too.”