Icinga Reporting – Hands On

After our initial release of Icinga Reporting for early adopters we continued our development and are happy to release v0.9.1 today. The release includes bug fixes and some minor enhancements for the usability. I want to take this opportunity to write a post aimed at the people who are new to the whole reporting shabang – like me 🙂
This week I set out to figuring out for myself why one would need to use reporting and how to get there – and to share my new knowledge with you!
 

What is reporting?

When I’m talking about reporting in this context I mean Business Reporting. I’ll give you a brief overview by citing good old wikipedia:

Business reporting or enterprise reporting refers to both “the public reporting of operating and financial data by a business enterprise,” and “the regular provision of information to decision-makers within an organization to support them in their work.”
 
– Wikipedia ‘Business Reporting’ (12.06.2019)

In short: Reporting means collecting data, from a certain period of time.
 

What does Icinga Reporting do?

In simple terms you could say, that the reporting module takes the data from the Icinga Database (IDO) or other modules and displays it. So you gain a nice overview directly in Icinga Web 2 and if you schedule the reports you can also get them per mail or export it to PDF, JSON or CSV format.
You can review the uptime of your hosts and services in the form of a recap of your chosen time period. This gives you the opportunity to improve the accessibility of your systems and environments in the long run. If you want a more in depth description I can point you to this article about the new reporting release.
 

Installation

The process of the installation is already described in the docs here, but for the sake of completeness I’ll do a quick walk through with you here as well.
I documented my way from my installation to my first report for you, installing both the reporting and the idoreporting modules:
 

Step 1: Cloning the reporting repository

You’ll want to navigate into the icingaweb2/modules repository and clone this repository under the name ‘reporting‘.

git clone git@github.com:Icinga/icingaweb2-module-reporting.git reporting

 

 

Step 2: Database creation

You will need to create a MySQL/MariaDB database – in this example it will be called ‘reporting‘ for convenience.
Create the db with:

CREATE DATABASE reporting;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, CREATE VIEW, INDEX, EXECUTE ON reporting.* TO reporting@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';

Then import the schema provided under etc/schema:

mysql -p -u root reporting < schema/mysql.sql

 

Step 3: Activate the module in Icinga Web 2

Log in with a privileged user in Icinga Web 2 and enable the module in Configuration/Modules. Alternatively you can use the icingacli and run icingacli module enable reporting

 

Step 4: Adding the resource

Once you’ve set up the database, create a new Icinga Web 2 resource for it using the Configuration/Application/Resources menu. Make sure that you set the character set to utf8mb4.

 

Step 5: Cloning the IDO reports repository

Like in step one, just that this time we will clone this repository under the name ‘idoreports’.

git clone git@github.com:Icinga/icingaweb2-module-idoreports.git idoreports

 

Step 6: Import schemas

This step is an analogy to step 2: Import the following schemas also found under etc/schema to your Icinga 2 database (IDO):

mysql -p -u icinga2 icinga2 < schema/slaperiods.sql
mysql -p -u icinga2 icinga2 < schema/get_sla_ok_percent.sql

 

Step 7: Activate IDO reports

Log in with a privileged user in Icinga Web 2 and enable the module in Configuration/Modules/idoreports. Alternatively you can use the icingacli and run icingacli module enable idoreports
 

Configuring a new Report

So you should now be at the point where you can start creating your first reports. Just navigate to the Reporting menu item and you should see a button reading ‘Add report‘.

You can define exactly what you want to see with the Filter, that you can use just like anywhere else in Icinga Web 2 to see only what is relevant to you.
Break it down by days, weeks or months to see what happened when.
Add your own threshold to set what value must be undershot before the tile will be coloured in an alarming red, so it sticks out for you to immediately see problematic entities.

 

Scheduler Daemon

In case you want to have a report sent out to you on a regular basis, you can use the scheduler daemon for that:

This command schedules the execution of all applicable reports. You may configure this command as systemd service. Just copy the example service definition from config/systemd/icinga-reporting.service to /etc/systemd/system/icinga-reporting.service and enable it afterwards:

systemctl enable icinga-reporting.service

You have everything in your hands now to get started with Icinga Reporting. For any questions please feel free to get in touch with us and our lovely community on community.icinga.com. We would love to hear some stories how you use reporting in your organization and how we can help you with your daily work!