Icinga, open source monitoring solution and Nagios fork released v1.9, celebrating their 4th birthday. v1.9 features improved performance and usability in the core and web interfaces, contributed partly by the community and parallel Icinga 2 development.
(OPENPRESS) Icinga, the open source monitoring solution released v1.9 in celebration of their 4th birthday since forking from Nagios. The release features performance and usability enhancements in the core and web interfaces, contributed in part by the community and concurrent Icinga 2 development.
Prototyping in Icinga 2 lead to the development of two IDOUtils features to improve core reload speed in large environments. A socket queue that uses a thread to proxy socket data -as opposed to a kernel message queue- has been added alongside a transactions buffer for large object dumps. The two enhancements save configuration to memory and write to the database in the background, significantly accelerating the core reload process:
"Our tests on a setup with 4000 services shows a tenfold improvement from 3 minutes to just 3 seconds till event loop start. This is a massive performance boost for enterprise environments with hundreds of hosts and services. Funnily enough it was made possible by our work on Icinga 2; we hope to continue to exploit such synergies between the two development streams", confirmed Core developer Michael Friedrich.
The user community contributed further performance improvements in the core, including host group exclusion in nested host groups by Alexander Sulfrian; triggered downtimes for child hosts at restart by Michael Lucka and empty host group service checks for environments with automated configuration deployment by Viranch Metha. Additionally, log file and illegal macro character processing are now quicker owing to collaboration with Andreas Ericsson.
Progress in Classic UI performance was also made — on configuration read using hash compare, configuration and status data parsing, as well as JSON functions. For greater user convenience, a new date and time selector to ease log file navigation was added, alongside optional automatic expiry and notifications for acknowledgements. These will be particularly useful in enterprise environments, as Packaging & QA developer Carl R. Friend notes:
"The intent is to modify observed admin behavior in large organizations where chronic problems get acknowledged and never resolved leading, eventually, to system failure. It also completes the configuration notion begun with 'default_expiring_acknowledgement_duration'."
Community involvement was apparent in Icinga Web v1.9 too, with users voting for the new list-style cronk menu that is now featured. A new flexible filter was also integrated, enabling users to combine multiple attributes per 'drag and drop'. Additionally, the Icinga Web permissions and credentials system was given an overhaul, improving the handling of user-restrictions and allowing groups, custom variables or combinations of them to be used.
Users are advised to review the new Apache configuration upon upgrade to Icinga Web v1.9, and remove existing htacesss files or restore order.deny rules where necessary.
With this release, Icinga also celebrates its 4th birthday as an open source project. Bernd Erk, Icinga Co-founder and Project Coordinator reflects:
"Version 1.9 marks our 4th birthday and the year we announced Icinga 2 — our break away from the Nagios code base and constraints as a fork. With this release however, I believe we have shown our commitment to developing Icinga 1.x further. And so we dedicate v1.9 to the Icinga community; for all their patches, ideas and support have ensured that four years on, we're still going strong!"
For more information, the Icinga project is found at: www.icinga.org
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Your contact at Icinga:
Amanda Mailer
Icinga Community & PR
www.icinga.org
amanda.mailer@icinga.org
Tel: +49 911 9288512
- NOTES TO THE EDITOR -
About Icinga
Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over a network and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries, and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor complex, large environments across dispersed locations. Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.
Though Icinga retains all the existing features of its predecessor, it builds on them to add many long awaited patches and features requested by the user community. This has culminated in standout features such as PostgreSQL and Oracle database support, improved extensibility through robust REST and plugin APIs as well as a user-friendly, dynamic web interface.
Concurrent to improving Icinga as a fork of Nagios, the Icinga Project is also actively developing Icinga 2, a Nagios core rewrite and core framework replacement.
Icinga 1.9 Change Log
Upgrade Notes
Icinga Web users are advised to review the new Apache configuration, remove all existing .htaccess files and restore order.deny rules (removed to support Apache 2.4) for setups that require them.
