Held on 2015-08-16 @ Debian Conference 2015 in Heidelberg, Germany.

1. www.icinga.org
Why favour Icinga over Nagios
2015-08-16

2. Markus Frosch
• Consultant @NETWAYS
• Icinga Team since 2012
• Organisation of Icinga 2
• Debian developer
@lazyfrosch

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. You?

6. • originally forked from Nagios in 2009
• focus on improvements and scalability
• independent version Icinga 2 since 2014
• web interfaces and addons

7. Icinga Core
Nagios based C-source
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle
Icinga Core
Nagios based C-source
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle
Icinga Quality, Testing and Community Support
Website and Open Source Ticketing System
Icinga Quality, Testing and Community Support
Website and Open Source Ticketing System
3rd
Party Tools3rd
Party Tools
Icinga Web
based on PHP using ExtJS, Agavi MVC
Icinga Web
based on PHP using ExtJS, Agavi MVC
IDOUTILSIDOUTILS
Icinga Web 2
Based on PHP / responsive design
Icinga Web 2
Based on PHP / responsive design
Icinga 2
C++-based source
with multiple components
Icinga 2
C++-based source
with multiple components
IDOIDO LivestatusLivestatus ClusterCluster APIAPI ……

8. Icinga 2
• release 2.3.8 (2015-07-20)
• new code base
• similar ideas
• Puppet, Chef and Ansible integration
• Packages and Vagrant Box available

9. WHY NAGIOS™ IS GOOD?

10. Nagios™ is good, because:
✔ monitoring things is very easy
✔ very simple software stack
✔ no complex external dependencies

11. Nagios™ is good, because:
✔ active checks are powerful
✔ gathering performance data
✔ huge community
✔ thousands of Plugins

12. OK, BUT WHY ICINGA THEN?

13. Nagios™ is open core

14. Nagios™ Inc. is not into community
✗ mailinglist has been converted to
a „customer support forum“
✗ trademark enforcement
✗ focus on selling the enterprise product

15. Icinga wants to be open
✔ community support
✔ all components 100% free software
✔ contributions welcome
✔ we won't sell our software

16. Nagios™ does not scale
✗ it's just a single loop
✗ limitations using external interfaces
✗ large installations are difficult

17. Icinga 2 on the other hand
✔ provides a multithreaded C++ Core
✔ distributes load in cluster automatically
✔ is able to monitor thousands of devices
every few seconds

18. MODULES

19. Modules in Nagios™?
# 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
define module {
module_name mklivestatus
path /usr/local/icinga/bin/livestatus.o
module_type neb
args /usr/local/icinga/var/rw/live
}

20. CheckerChecker
NotifyNotify
API
(soon)
API
(soon)
CompatCompat ClusterCluster
IDOIDO GELFGELF
GraphiteGraphite
PerfdataPerfdata
OpenTSDBOpenTSDB
LivestatusLivestatus

21. # icinga2 feature enable livestatus
# icinga2 feature enable ido-mysql
# vim /etc/icinga2/features-
available/ido-mysql.conf

22. CLUSTERING

23. How about high available Nagios™?
✗ there is no integrated failover mechanism
✗ configuration is not distributed
✗ no shared monitoring information

24. What Icinga 2 provides you
✔ zones for multitenancy environments
✔ support for logic splits in the config
✔ availability and scaling zones
✔ automatic redistribution of checks
✔ master / satellite / agent

25. central
datacenter
central
datacenter
CheckerChecker ConfigConfig
Live
status
Live
status
CheckerChecker
DatabaseDatabase
IDOIDO
IDOIDO
remote
location
CheckerChecker

26. Nagios™ and security
✗ NSCA works, but not in a good way
✗ NRPE has a couple of security issues
✗ You can make it secure … by hand

27. Icinga 2 clustering is PKI TLS only
✔ bidirectional connections
✔ helps you setting up a CA
✔ replication of events and status

28. CONFIGURATION

29. Nagios™ config tricks are weird…
define service{
host_name linux1,linux2,linux3,...,linux9
service_description ssh-check
other service directives ...
}

30. Icinga 2 brings logic
apply Service "ssh" {
import "generic-service”
check_command = "ssh”
assign where host.address && host.vars.os == "Linux”
ignore where host.vars.test == true
}

31. Nagios™ can only do lists
define hostgroup{
hostgroup_name linux-servers
alias Linux Servers
members linux1,linux2,linux3
}

32. Icinga 2 wants to unterstand you
object HostGroup "mysql-server" {
display_name = "MySQL Server“
assign where match("*mysql*", host.name)
assign where host.vars.role == "mysql-server"
ignore where host.vars.environment != "production"
}

33. ONE MORE THING...

34. Icinga 2 is enhanceable
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
}
}}
}

35. WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET

36. ✗ limitations in current Icinga interfaces
✗ parsing the status.dat is not fast
✗ executing commands is tedious
✗ really hard to extend and integrate
✗ no unified interface so far

37. Icingaweb 2
• easy to extend and embed
• multiple authentication providers
• reads from IDO database
• responsive
release soon
TM

38. Web 2MySQL /
PostgreSQL
MySQL /
PostgreSQL
2
or Icinga 1
The simplest setup
set up within a few minutes...

42. THE COMMUNITY

43. You?

44. Berlin 2016
March 1st
Berlin 2016
March 1st
Portland 2015
October 10th
Portland 2015
October 10th
Icinga Camp community meetups

45. Where to start?
• Start with the documentation
• Download Icinga 2
• Rethink you configuration
• Install Icinga Web 2 and play with it
• Give us feedback
#icinga

46. THANK YOU!
www.icinga.org
exchange.icinga.org
docs.icinga.org
dev.icinga.org
git.icinga.org
@icinga
/icinga
+icinga