1. Monitoring with
Icinga
Marius Ducea
Promet Solutions
SF Bay Area #LSPE
July 21, 2011

2. whoami
• System Administrator
• Web Operations Engineer
• Consultant

4. Icinga: intro
What does the word icinga mean?
It’s a Zulu word, meaning:
• look around
• browse
• search for, examine
How to pronounce it correctly?
• however you like...

5. Icinga: intro
What is icinga?
Fork of Nagios (backwards compatible)
Open Source monitoring system:
• monitor
• notify
• report
Actively maintained
GPL v2

6. Icinga: intro
Why a fork?
Frustrations among Nagios contributors
Core nagios developer = 1 person
Very few suggestions and patches from community
made it into nagios
As we all know nagios has not evolved much in
many years

7. Icinga: history
Changelog
• May 2009 – icinga is announced
– v0.8, first beta is released
• December 2009 – v1.0 first
stable version released
• 17 releases so far
• Today – v1.4.2

8. Icinga: architecture
Icinga components
Icinga Core
Icinga Web
Icinga API
Icinga Reporting
IDOutils
Icinga Mobile

9. Icinga: architecture
Icinga core
• manages monitoring tasks
• receives check results from various plugins
• communicates check results to IDODB

10. Icinga: architecture
Icinga API
• fetches information (like check results) from the
core, through the IDODB
• PHP based, with no dependencies on other
libraries or frameworks
• data collected from the IDODB by the API is then
presented in the Icinga Web

11. Icinga: architecture
Icinga Web
• online portal to view Icinga monitoring results
• send commands to Icinga Core
• Ajax based, supports dragging and dropping of
various screen components
• flexible
• customizable

12. Icinga: architecture / Classic Web

13. Icinga: architecture / Web

14. Icinga: architecture / Web

15. Icinga: architecture
Icinga Reporting
• reporting addon
• based on Jasper Reports
• visualization of SLAs
• capacity planning
• format of reports PDF, HTML, Excel, CSV, RTF
• predefined templates

16. Icinga: architecture / Reporting

17. Icinga: architecture
Icinga Mobile

18. Icinga vs Nagios

19. Icinga vs Nagios

20. Icinga: tips
How To install icinga
• Source install
– tar.gz from sourceforge
– git clone git://git.icinga.org/icinga-core.git
• Packages available
– included in debian/ubuntu, 3rd party rpms available also
• Chef users? you can use my icinga cookbook
– https://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/icinga
– https://github.com/mdxp/icinga-cookbook

21. Icinga: tips
How To migrate from nagios
• ’s/nagios/icinga/g’ ?
• you can reuse your existing objects
(commands.cfg, services.cfg, hosts.cfg, etc)
• nagios.cfg becomes icinga.cfg
• you can even compile icinga with nagios user,
group, path, etc.

22. Icinga: help
Support
• www.icinga.org
• wiki.icinga.org
• IRC: #icinga on freenode
• mailing lists, forums, twitter

23. Questions?
Marius Ducea
marius@promethost.com
@mariusducea
github.com/mdxp
blog: www.ducea.com
site: promethost.com
slides: slideshare.net/mdxp