As Icinga is a Community driven product, we spread the communication with the community over different platforms. All of them serve different purposes, as all of the them have different strengths. Today I want to give you all a little overview over which platforms are out there that are centered around Icinga and what their focus and specific use cases are.
Work Tools
For different tasks there are different tools. Our web presentation is very much like that and there are many different places for many different reasons.
GitHub
This is where the source code lies and the developers crawl. You can find the repositories of our projects here, each with an issue tracker, the unrendered documentation (ready for your documentation improvement suggestions!), and of course the code to dig through.
If you want to get started with contributing, pick a project you are familiar with, check the issues and see if you can solve one!
Documentation
As the name might let off already, this is where you find everything you can learn and know about our products. For each product we have a rendered documentation that makes it easy to navigate through the chapters with links and sticky tables of content. The entire documentation is pulled from our latest releases’ docs directory with a link to the corresponding repo. That way you can suggest improvements to the documentation with ease!
Community Forum
The forum is probably where you land every now and then when you look up any questions in the search machine of your choice. No matter what your issue is, if you are a beginner or power user, the community will be there to help you out. It’s not only a place for questions, but also tutorials in the How-to section. Feel free to hop on and see if you can help out other users and contribute to the discussion.
Icinga Exchange
You can look at our Exchange as some sort of free app store for plugins, addons, modules, integrations, themes and the like. All for free and from the community for the community. If you ever write your own code for Icinga, feel free to upload it to Icinga Exchange.
Icinga Blog
Well, since you are reading this article here, you already know about the blog. We from team Icinga try to post here at least once a week. Everyone, from developer to partner manager, writes a short article about a topic they would like to talk about and might be interesting to you. If you yourself have something you would like to see published here, feel free to contact us with our contact form and we can arrange a cooperation.
Our Socials
We try to deliver a good social media experience across the different big sites, each matching their individual style and strengths.
I personally am mostly looking after our Twitter account. Trying to give meaningful answers to questions in just a few words or showing off some slices of life from our office (this has suffered a little from the lockdown) is a difficult yet fun thing to do. Feel free to chat us up, you can find the account under @icinga.
If you want to stay up to date on what is happening in the Icingaverse you can follow Icinga on Facebook. There you will receive all updates on events, blogposts and news on our projects!
If you prefer the more formal LinkedIn over Facebook, we post much the same content here. In addition, we are also looking for new business contacts and hires over there. The amount of activity and connectivity on LinkedIn actually came as a surprise to me, as I just made an account last year for feedback week and it is a very vivid community over there.
YouTube
Admittedly, our YouTube channel doesn’t have too many recent videos at the moment. We usually upload recordings from our events and camps to the channel, our most recent recording is from our Icinga Insights. We are looking forward to fill it with more content in the future again!
Communities
These are communities that have formed without the input of Icinga and are still fully managed by the community.
The subbredit /r/icinga is a comparatively small one, with just under 800 members. But as Reddit is centered around discourse you can help each other out and figure out the most popular plugins and modules under your posts and discuss with fellow Redditors who are passionate about monitoring.
IRC
Being a chat tool by nature, you can just go there, ask a question and hope for an answer. It has toned down a lot over the past years, so if you are using IRC, feel free to hop on over, say hello and see if you can breathe some life back into it. It’s #icinga on Freenode.
Discord
The platform I am active on the most in private is probably Discord. There are servers for all sorts of topics and the Icinga server is one of them. It is currently also pretty small and there has been talk of maybe renovating the channel setup. If you feel like hopping over tere to chat and help out, feel free to join 🙂
