Two and a half month have gone by since version 1.2.0. Yesterday we tagged the latest release: version 1.3.0. As we all know, Director is a fantastic tool for automation, being the glue between your various data sources and your monitoring. But in the rough real world not all the things are always automated. Therefore, this release puts focus on managing all those “little exemptions” many of you are facing in their daily work with in semi-automated environments.
We now provide more instruments that should make those manual tasks quick and more enjoyable. New filter-based Custom Fields are for example a powerful instrument when it goes to provide specialized wizard-like forms to your users. Our documentation shows a related real-world example for SNMP-based checks. Please give it a look to get an impression of what is possible right now. Build it once and delegate all those daily changes!
Host-based Custom Variable Overrides have already been introduced with the last release. This version goes one step further. When showing a Host’s Services the Director now evaluates all Services assigned via Apply Rules and shows those matching the chosen Host. Guess what? It’s now perfectly possible to override all Custom Fields (think: thresholds) for all applied services on every single host without breaking inheritance or assignments. Depending on where the service came from, a fitting help text is shown:
Service Sets are the new kid on the block. They allow you to assign multiple services at once. Above rule also applies here: you can easily override thresholds for services belonging to a Set on every single Host:
As more and more features are steadily coming in, it became harder to spot what you’re looking for. So we started to make navigation paths easier. One result of those efforts are new, smaller Dashboards dedicated to specialized tasks. Notifications and Infrastructure are the first implementations of this pattern:
This makes the main Dashboard more compact:
One new feature is shown on the Infrastructure Dashboard: it now links to the Kickstart Wizard. This has been a hidden feature since 1.2.0. As it proved to work well, it got a prominent place in the GUI and some short hints on the related Dashboard. Please trigger it when adding new Master or Satellite nodes to your Icinga infrastructure. This also comes in handy when you add manually defined commands to your plain-text configuration.
This is not required for Icinga Agents – configure them as you always did. What’s new in that relation is that you are now allowed to specify whether a Host is an Agent (and to which parent Zone it eventually belongs) directly on every single Host. Should be useful for setups with one or more Satellite layers, as you are now no longer required to create dedicated “Host in Zone X” templates.
That’s just a small extract of our changes, so please read the full changelog for more details on new features, bugfixes and improvements in this release!
