Most sys admins have a love-hate relationship with Nagios based monitoring solutions. Backed by a sizable community, users have learned to live with it’s shortcomings in scaling, configuration, and modern integration options. Taking advantage of the tremendous number of supported hard- and software, Icinga leaves all legacy limitations behind. It delivers an easily scalable solution, with clustering, load balancing, automated replication, and even business process monitoring out-of-the-box. Based on a new configuration format with advanced language features - like conditional processing and complex type support - monitoring agile environments works like a breeze. Existing modules for Puppet, Chef and Ansible ramp up the rollout time and ensure a continuous and up to date monitoring environment. The talk will demonstrate how popular tools such as Graphite, Logstash, or Graylog integrate better and easier than ever before. In addition to that we’ll introduce the new Icinga Web 2 interface and give a brief introduction into the technical architecture.

1. www.icinga.org
Why favour Icinga over Nagios
OSDC Berlin - 23th April 2015

2. • Bernd Erk
• Working @NETWAYS
• Icinga Co-Founder
• @gethash

3. THE ICINGA PROJECT

4. Open Source Enterprise Monitoring
Icinga is a scalable and extensible monitoring system
which checks the availability of your resources, notifies
users of outages and provides extensive BI data.

5. • Originally forked from Nagios in 2009
• Independent version Icinga 2 since 2014

6. You?

9. Icinga Core
C-based source
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle
Icinga Quality, Testing and Community Support
Website and Open Source Ticketing System
Icinga Reports
based on Jasper
Reports
Icinga Doc
based on
Markdown
3rd Party Tools
Icinga Web
based on PHP using ExtJS, Agavi MVC
IDOUTILS
Icinga Web 2
Based on PHP / responsive design
Icinga 2
C++-based source with
multiple components
IDO Livestatus Cluster …

10. ICINGA 2 - INTRODUCTION

11. • Monitors everything
• In a regular interval
• Gathering status
• Collect performance data

12. • Notifies using any channel
• Detects dependencies
• Handles events in configured way

13. • Forwards logs to Logstash and Graylog
• Passes performance data to Graphite,
OpenTSDB or InfluxDB

14. • Based on C++ and Boost
• Supports MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Includes a extensive template library

15. • Version 2.3.4 is out since a couple of days
• Puppet, Chef and Ansible support
• Packages and Vagrant Box available

16. WHY NAGIOS™ IS GOOD?

17. • Monitoring things is very easy
• Very simple software stack
• No complex external dependencies

18. • Active checks are powerful
• Gathering performance data
• Huge community
• Thousands of Plugins

19. OK, BUT WHY ICINGA THEN?

20. NAGIOS DOES NOT SCALE

21. • It is just a single loop
• Limitations using external interfaces

22. • Icinga 2 is a multithreaded C++ Core
• Load is distributed automatically
• Ability to monitor thousands of devices in
second interval

24. ADDING MODULES IS HARD

25. # tar xzvf mk-livestatus-1.2.4.tar.gz
# cd mk-livestatus-1.2.4
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/icinga
--exec-prefix=/usr/local/icinga
# make
# cp src/livestatus.o /usr/local/icinga/bin

26. define module {
module_name mklivestatus
path /usr/local/icinga/bin/livestatus.o
module_type neb
args /usr/local/icinga/var/rw/live
}

27. Checker
Notify
Gelf
Perfdata Graphite
IDO
Compat
Livestatus

28. • We have a powerful CLI
• Adding new features is easy
• You can really really do sophisticated setups
… but you don’t have too

29. # icinga2 feature enable livestatus
# icinga2 feature enable ido-mysql

30. DEMO

31. NO CLUSTERING AND DISTRIBUTION

32. • There is no integrated failover mechanism
• Configuration is not distributed
• No shared monitoring information

33. • Zones for multitenancy environments
• Support for logic splits in the config
• Availability and scaling zones
• Automatic redistribution of checks

34. IDO
Config
Checker
Livestatus Checker
IDO
Checker
Perfdata GELF

35. SECURITY IS A MESS

36. • NSCA works, but not in a good way
• NRPE has a couple of security issues
• You can make it secure … by hand

37. • Bidirectional communication using SSL
• “binlog” like retention for events
• Distributed features throughout the cluster

38. CONFIGURATION LIMITS

39. define service{
host_name linux1,linux2,linux3,...,linux9
service_description ssh-check
other service directives ...
}

40. apply Service "ssh" {
import "generic-service”
check_command = "ssh”
assign where host.address && host.vars.os == "Linux”
}

41. apply Service "ssh" {
import "generic-service”
check_command = "ssh”
assign where host.address && host.vars.os == "Linux”
ignore where host.vars.test == true
}

42. define hostgroup{
hostgroup_name linux-servers
alias Linux Servers
members linux1,linux2,linux3
}

43. object Host “mysql-server1" {
address = "10.0.0.1“
check_command = "hostalive“
}
object HostGroup "mysql-server" {
display_name = "MySQL Server“
assign where match("*mysql*", host.name)
}

44. ONE MORE THING …

45. object Service ”webservice" {
import "generic-service”
check_command = ”load”
host_name = “a really great server”
vars.load_wload1 = {{
if (get_time_period(“9to5”).is_inside) {
return 40
} else {
return 60
}
}}
}

46. • Different config format
• Won’t miss the old config!
• It is really time for change
• You will love it!

47. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU
GET

48. HOPEFULLY NOT!

51. • Parsing status.dat is not really cool
• Executing commands is hard
• Very inflexible architecture

52. • Limitations in current Icinga interfaces
• Really hard to extend and integrate
• No unified interface so far

53. • Easy to extend and embed
• Multiple authentication providers
• Support for db and livestatus
• Responsive

54. Web 2
Monitoring Docs
BP Graphite PNP

55. Demo

56. THE COMMUNITY

57. You?

58. Portland 2015
October 10th
Kuala Lumpur 2015
June 9th

59. CONCLUSION

61. • Download Icinga 2
• Rethink you configuration
• Install Icinga Web 2 and play with it
• Give us feedback
#icinga

62. THANK YOU!
www.icinga.org
dev.icinga.org
git.icinga.org
@icinga
/icinga
+icinga