Today we finally have great news to share for everyone using Icinga to monitor Hyper-V and Windows Cluster environments. For quite some time we’ve been working on multiple new plugins to provide better monitoring option for Hyper-V and Windows Cluster. The new plugins are based on our PowerShell framework provided by Icinga for Windows. For the new plugins we decided to provide a preview first, in favour of a final release.
Why a Preview
During development and testing we realized that we receive different results, depending on the system configuration. We believe most of the common issues we encountered are resolved by now. We would still like to collect additional user feedback. Therefore the new plugins can be used directly from the master branch on GitHub from the Hyper-V and Cluster repository. If you run into any problems, please feel free to open a GitHub issues on the Hyper-V and Cluster project.
Why new module collections
To ensure we can ship plugins more frequently and provide an easier way to decide which plugins are installed on your systems, we decided to create new repositories and module collections based on the type of monitoring. Here’s a short list to give you a better idea on how we sort the plugins:
- Icinga PowerShell Plugins: Everything related to basic Windows monitoring which is present without installing additional components or features
- Icinga PowerShell MSSQL: Everything related for monitoring MSSQL systems
- Icinga PowerShell Hyper-V: Everything related for monitoring Hyper-V itself
- Icinga PowerShell Cluster: Everything related for monitoring Windows clusters in general and distributed file systems
In addition to this, there are some cross-requirements for certain plugins implemented. For example, if your virtual machines are stored on a Cluster Shared volume, you will have to install the Icinga PowerShell Cluster module in addition for proper monitoring. This is nothing we enforce as plugin dependency, as there are environments where no Cluster Shared volumes are used for this case. If the module is required on the system to fetch the virtual machine file states, the plugin output will notify you about this. Once you install the Cluster Plugins, you will receive the results as expected.
Monitoring Hyper-V
Starting with Hyper-V PowerShell Plugins, we ship the following five plugins:
- Invoke-IcingaCheckHyperVHealth: Checks the general availability, state and health of the Hyper-V server
- Invoke-IcingaCheckHyperVOverCommitment: Calculates CPU, RAM and Storage overcommitment of a Hyper-V Server
- Invoke-IcingaCheckHyperVSnapshot: Monitors age, disk space, count and file size of VM snapshots
- Invoke-IcingaCheckHyperVVirtualSwitches: Checks the state of a Hyper-V virtual switch
- Invoke-IcingaCheckHyperVVMHealth: Determines the current state of the Hyper-V virtual machine
If you have additional requirements or ideas what we should cover with our monitoring, pleases do not hesitate to open a feature request!
To install the Hyper-V plugins, please have a look on the installation guide. If you can connect to the internet from your windows server and you have the latest framework installed, you can simply run this command:
Install-IcingaFrameworkComponent -Name HyperV -Snapshot;
Monitoring Windows Cluster
For monitoring Windows Clusters, we decided to start by shipping three different plugins for monitoring:
- Invoke-IcingaCheckClusterHealth: Checks the state and availability of a Cluster Service
- Invoke-IcingaCheckClusterNetwork: Monitors the status of a Cluster network and its interfaces
- Invoke-IcingaCheckClusterSharedVolume: Checks the available space on cluster Shared Volumes and additionally the availability and state of the targeted Cluster Shared Volume from each Cluster nodes
Like for Hyper-V, please feel free to share feature requests with us for additional monitoring capabilities!
To install the Cluster plugins, please have a look on the installation guide. If you can connect to the internet from your machine and you have the latest framework installed, you can simply run this command:
Install-IcingaFrameworkComponent -Name Cluster -Snapshot;
What happens next
As for theses plugin collections, we would like to collect as much feedback as possible and – if required – fix any open issues occurring during the preview phase. If no big show-stopper appears, we intend to release both plugin collections by the end of February as v1.0.0.
We hope you enjoy the plugins and we look forward to all your feedback, ideas, and contributions to extend Icinga for Windows even further, ensuring we can cover most parts of the Microsoft Eco-System! Stay healthy and have a wonderful time!
