In recent years, Nagios’ popularity as an open source monitoring solution has seen it evolve into a quasi open source industry standard. Its extensive monitoring capabilities and high adaptability have attracted organisations of all sizes, including Amazon, BMW, Google, T-Mobile, Siemens, and many others. Many of the features that have made Nagios so effective are extensions of the actual software written by numerous developers worldwide.
In contrast, the core of this system – the Nagios software itself- is maintained by a single developer in the United States and hence is developed at a slower pace. The Nagios community has previously attempted to clear this bottleneck with suggestions to broaden the developer base. Long awaited improvements such as the regular integration of community patches, the connection to databases or the web interface were hoped to be accelerated. Unfortunately, these attempts came to little success and effective community commitment has gradually deflated.
Over the past 6 months, the situation has escalated with Nagios Enterprises LLC requesting several long term community projects to state that they are not officially connected to Nagios. In a few cases the companies were requested to change their open source project names or transfer their domains over. This combination of reduced visible software development and disproportionate actions against long time Nagios supporters has irritated many active community members.
To overcome these obstacles and to ensure above all, the continuous development of this popular monitoring software, a group of active, long standing Nagios community supporters have resolved to fork Nagios and open its development to a broader base. This team currently consists of members of the previous Nagios community advisory board, developers of numerous Nagios extensions and people from NETWAYS, the organiser of the Monitoring Conference on Nagios and provider of the MonitoringExchange (formely NagiosExchange) platform. Under the new name ‘Icinga’, fork supporters have now opened a new project. In the first release of this new software, some enduring bugs will be removed and database connections will be improved. A new web interface and a standardised API will be introduced to simplify the integration of addons. The main addons for performance charts, visualisation or business process monitoring will also be available in a version adapted for the final Icinga release.
