The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Today we release our stable version of Icinga 2.0: One incredibly powerful, ingeniously scalable piece of monitoring software that is simple to install, logical to configure and easy to extend.
If you have been on another planet for the last 20 months, you can catch up on our numerous blog posts and milestone releases. For the rest of you – download away (from package or source), dive into the docs and enjoy the new monitoring wonder that is Icinga 2.
Why upgrade you ask?
Icinga 2 performance is a joy in itself. Thanks to its multithreaded design we’ve seen one instance run 1 million active checks a minute to monitor 60,000 hosts without a creak.
Installation is simple as the usual functions you need come shipped with Icinga 2 (e.g. IDO, performance data writing, logging and more). You need only activate them with our soft link command “icinga2-enable-feature”. Accompanied by upcoming Puppet modules and Ansible playbooks, installation is easy in large environments too.
The new configuration format is logical and saves you stress in the long run. Once you apply and assign your first template, define conditional behaviours for commands and adjust notification settings at runtime, you’ll never look back. Did we mention that dependencies make sense in Icinga 2, and you can set recurring downtimes?
Extending is easy because Icinga 2 has multiple back-ends and supports Livestatus and Graphite natively – who can say no to realtime performance graphing?
Oh by the way, you can setup distributed, high-availability monitoring straight out-of-the-box. Just enable the Icinga 2 cluster feature. Clustered Icinga 2 instances autonomously manage load balancing of checks, notifications and database updates as well as replicate configuration and program states in real-time.
Most importantly, we’ve thought of everything to make migration as painless as possible. We’ve dedicated a chapter to it in our Icinga 2 Docs with ‘migration hints’ on how to translate Icinga 1 / Nagios configurations to Icinga 2. We’ve got config syntax highlighting in vim and nano help with your editing, and a configuration validator to help you find errors. Heck, we’ve even written a config migration script to help get you started!
Lastly, there’s something quirky about this release. On 16 December 2009 we presented Icinga Core 1.0. Today, exactly 4.5 years later on 16 June 2014 in a strange stroke of fate we bring you Icinga 2.0 – after 20 months of work. It certainly was not planned; perhaps it’s in the stars.
And yet, if the numerology hasn’t convinced you, vagrant up a demo (or even our cluster demo) and see for yourself.
To everyone who has helped make Icinga 2 happen – with patch, package, bug report or helpful idea – we say thank you for helping us create what we believe is the most impressive open source monitoring solution around.
