A couple of weeks ago the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) took place in Nuremberg, Germany. For over a decade now the OSMC provides a platform for monitoring engineers and open source vendors from the field. Icinga is part of this conference since the beginning. For us the event is a highlight every year and we take the chance to spend time with the community and give updates about our products. Like every year, our CEO Bernd summarized again the current state of Icinga. This is a summary of his talk, held on November 9, 2021.
Bernd kicked of his talk with a general introduction about Icinga. Even though the majority of the attendees are familiar with Icinga, some of the participants are not. This reflects the spirit of the OSMC, offering content from many different open source monitoring solutions. Bernd continues with an overview over the releases through this year.
Icinga v2.13
Icinga version 2.13 was release this August and includes a couple of highlights. While the focus of this release is the compatibility with Icinga DB, especially the RedisWriter, it includes a lot of bug fixes as well. We added support for InfluxDB v2.0 as well as native support for the Windows Event Log. Read the release blogpost
Icinga Web v2.9
In July this year we released version 2.9 of Icinga Web. The release includes the long awaited “Remember Me” feature wich allows you to stay logged in in the web interface. Additional enhancements include support for PHP 8 and many small enhancements in the UI. An outstanding feature of this release is the extended role based access control. Icinga Web now allows you to inherit roles and refuse permissions. To make it easier to track how a users permissions are composed we added an audit trail for user permissions. Bernd demonstrates the whole functionality during his presentation. Read the release blogpost
Icinga for Windows v1.6
While Icinga for Windows is mainly developed by Christian, also others take part in developing plugins and features for our Windows Monitoring suite. The latest version (at the time Bernd was giving the talk) was version 1.6, released in September. The version introduced a dedicated management console to simplify the installation and configuration tasks. Additionally JEA profiles found their way into this release as well as a bunch of new plugins to monitor MSSQL, Hypyer-V and Windows Clusters. In the meantime version 1.7 is released and Christian informed us about the changes in his very own talk at the OSMC: Icinga for Windows – Evolution by Christian Stein
Container Support
We provide docker images for Icinga 2, Icinga Web and Icinga DB. While we do not provide ready-to-use docker compose files yet, the images are maintained and updated on a regular basis. It is great to see that these images are already being used by a couple of attendees of the OSMC.
Icinga Module for Jira v1.1
According to Bernd Jira is a software that many use but only a few admit to use it 😉 We had enough reasons to update our module for integrating Jira with Icinga. The latest release came in May this year and fixes a couple of bugs and introduces some neat feature to handle issue creation more flexible. Read the release blogpost
Upcoming Releases
As you can see a lot happened during the last year, and a lot more is coming. Here’s what you can expect in the short term:
Icinga Module for vSphere v1.2
The upcoming release was announced by Bernd during his talk. Version v1.2 of our vSphere integration comes with many changes under the hood to improve the performance of the pollen by using less processes, less memory and allowing faster polling at the same time. The UI got many improvements, such as a new structure for host and VM information. One major feature of this release is the support for the InfluxDB time series database. The module sends metrics of vSphere with a resolution of up to 20 seconds. Right after the OSMC we released v1.2 as promised. Stay tuned on this Blog, we’ll provide more details about the release soon.
Icinga Director v1.9
Version 1.9 of Icinga Director is not released yet, but you can expect it soon. The major changes of this release include the introduction of UUIDs for all Icinga objects. This will enable us to build some neat features in the future. Additionally v1.9 is going to include the ability to allow regular users to modify hosts and services directly without giving them access to the Director in general. Director baskets will allow purges before importing.
Icinga DB
The Icinga DB accompanies us though the last couple of OSMC’s, also this year. Performance bottlenecks, schema updates, downsizing core functionality and a foundation for the future development – these and more are the reasons for Icinga DB Bernd explains. While there was a first release candidate in 2020 the whole project was rebooted in December 2020, leading us to a fresh RC2 of Icinga DB. Bernd demonstrates the performance improvements: Icinga DB takes 20 seconds to dump a couple of thousands monitoring objects, the IDO took 4 minutes for the same amount. The UI got many new features as well: new filter editor, modals, source tab, view mode switcher and many more. Bernd demonstrates all of this in a live demo. Right after the OSMC we release RC2, get the details in our Blog: Releasing Icinga DB v1.0-RC2
Brand
Giving Icinga a visual identity was a major task for us during the last years. Even though this is not a typical technical feature, Bernd explains why it is important to us and how we evolved the Icinga brand during the process. You see the results on our website and everywhere else in our marketing communication. We will continue this journey and bring the new Brand to Icinga Web as well, with an upcoming release in early 2022 which will include a dark theme. Bernd demonstrates a sneak peak of the new web interface.
Icinga Talks
We postponed IcingaConf to 2023, for obvious reasons. However, we will do our best to reboot IcingaCamp’s in 2022, depending on how the ongoing pandemic will allow us to organise the events. During OSMC we could follow a bunch of other Icinga related Talks:
- Current State of Icinga by Bernd Erk
- Contributing to Open Source with the example of Icinga by Feu Mourek
- Icinga for Windows – Evolution by Christian Stein
- Monitoring @ G&D by Karsten Fischer
- Still directing the director… and more! by Sebastian Gumprich & Daniel Uhlmann
Next Releases
Most of the releases announced by Bernd are already published: Icinga v2.13.2, Icinga Web v2.9.4, Icinga DB v1.0-RC1. Other upcoming releases will follow in early 2022, Bernd explains: Icinga Web with the dark theme and Icinga Director v1.9.
