Icinga Director is a configuration management tool that allows for easy centralized configuration and deployment of monitoring configurations to Icinga nodes. It supports fully automated environments as well as point-and-click users. The talk demonstrated Icinga Director's installation, architecture, automation capabilities, REST API, and extensibility through modules. Icinga Director aims to make monitoring configuration "just work" across dynamic infrastructures.

1. www.icinga.org
Icinga Director
IcingaCamp Amsterdam – 28/06/16

2. Thomas Gelf
Web 2 Product owner
Module prototyping machine
Principal Consultant @netways

3. AGENDA

4. Talk structure
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6. HISTORY

7. Motivations for a new config tool
Icinga 2: new config format DSL
old config tools do not fit any more
Ever configured a DSL?

8. Getting started

9. Installation
provide a database
tell Director...
...and he cares about the rest

10. Using Puppet?
Idempotency out of the box :-)
Try `--help` or the documentation for more information
Same for Kickstart!

11. Let's try it out!

12. CONFIGURATION MADE EASY

13. Icinga Director's target audience
fully automated environments
point & click users
at the very same time (!!)

14. Show me the click thingy!

15. DEMO

16. ARCHITECTURE

17. Architecture
• How and where to attach
• How does it talk to my Icinga nodes
• Masters, Satellites, Agents?

18. Architecture

19. Protocol
• Uses the Icinga 2 API (TLS, REST)
• Ships whole config, not single objects
• This is ways faster with lots of objects
• Could still ship partial changes

20. Communication Paths
• Director talks to your master node(s)
• Deploys always to the very same node
• Knows agents / satellites
• Controls them via config distribution

21. AUTOMATION FIRST

22. Import & Sync
• Bomb it with your data
• Do not really care about sync details

23. Automate all the tasks
• Import, Sync and Config Deployment
• Granular control. Automatic
Deployment only at office hours and
not more then one deployment every
10 minutes? Sure, why not.

24. Icinga loves automation
• Director is a perfect fit for Puppet
• Collecting resources with Puppet is slow
• Faster: sync from PDB
• Exporting resources?
• Use Director as your collector!

28. Cloud first

29. Impossible, show me a demo

30. IS IT APIFIED?

31. Director offers a REST API
• Simple and powerful
• Easy and intuitive to use
• Assists you with the trickiest part of the
job: detect and handle changes

40. Monitoring has to „just work“
• No one wants to waste time on it
• But not every system is fully automated
• e.g. „Add a new MSSQL instance“
• Environmental sensors

41. Deploying every few minutes?
• Don't want to wait for next Puppet run?
• New hosts or apps need to be actively
monitored seconds after being deployed

42. Demo

43. HOW CAN YOU USE DIRECTOR?

44. Lots of datasources?
Director is your single source of truth
CMDB has a lot of infomation...
...but not everything
...and somewhat outdated
Use it nonetheless
Enrich it with other sources

45. Using Satellites?
• Use templates with defined Zone
• Config flows top-bottom
• Commands and templates are usually
still deployed to the global zone
• You can override those decisions on any
object at any time

46. Running Icinga 2 Agent?
Do not care about Zones and Endpoints
They are autocreated
Provided certificate signing tickets
Generated customized icinga2.conf

47. EXTEND IT!

48. Director is highly modular
Current Hooks:
DataType, ImportSource,
PropertyModifier, ShipConfigFiles
Even Directors own implementations extend and use them to
provide you nice real-world examples

49. Demo

50. USE IT!

51. Code
https://www.github.com/Icinga
→ icingaweb2-module-director
https://www.github.com/Thomas-Gelf
→ icingaweb2-module-aws
→ icingaweb2-module-puppetdb
→ icingaweb2-module-fileshipper

52. Thank You!
www.icinga.org
dev.icinga.org
git.icinga.org
@icinga
/icinga
+icinga

53. QUESTIONS?
Thomas Gelf
<thomas.gelf@netways.de>