For the third time, we initiated the Icinga Feedback Week. Why? Because your opinion matters to us, a lot. Even though, we do get feedback throughout the year, our yearly Feedback Week is a chance for us, to ask you specific questions to certain topics. By understanding your thoughts and feelings towards Icinga, we aim to develop the most effective monitoring tool for you.

But that wasn’t all: as a good tradition, we asked you to choose your Community Heroes and we have found five! Scroll down to see who will go down in monitoring history and featured in the Icinga Hall of Fame, which – in this case – is our Community page!

We know, you’re just as curious about the results, so we summed them up for you in this blogpost. Let’s get started:

 

Monday: Community Club

In terms of the Community Forum, where do you see space for growth/improvement?
The majority voted for “We need more users” & “The platform needs improvement”. This means for us, that firstly, we are going to start posting more about the forum, bringing it forward in the minds of Icinga users. We also want to improve some of the aspects in the Forum in the near future, like reworking the welcome guide and the plugins we are using!

How do you inform yourself about what’s new in the tech world?
Except for the people on Twitter, who tend towards social media, the rest of you focus mostly on news portals. This is not entirely unexpected, but helps us adjust our marketing content!

Where do you usually get your monitoring plugins from?
The majority of voters gets their plugins straight from GitHub, while about a third stated the Icinga Exchange as their preferred source. This question lead to some very good constructive criticism about our Exchange platform that we can now put some focus on.

What Social Media platforms do you use on a regular basis?
This question confirmed our choice of social media that we publish our content on. We’re happy to hear that we didn’t miss out on any big trends and will keep on posting!

Tuesday: Product Party

How many modules are you using?
The most common answers were either “Just one or two”, or “A lot of them”. This makes me wonder if setting up modules is too complicated or if it depends more on the environment they are in.
This would definitely be something to pick up on for a more in-depth survey!

Are you using Icinga DB or IDO?
Nowadays, a lot more people use Icinga DB than last year, and a lot of people running both in parallel. With the better performance and some new features and modules catering to Icinga DB, it is slowly becoming the new normal.

How do you receive notifications?
Via Mail is still the most used primary notification method, messengers of all kinds are slowly catching up. Some discussions in the comments showed, that most environments have multiple channels and escalations for their notifications. Since Icinga is currently focussing on making notifications better and easier this will help us find the right path.

What channels are the most relevant to you when it comes to receiving Icinga notifications?
When it comes to messengers, Teams and Slack are the most interesting to look out for at the moment.

Do you remember how much time you spent on your initial Icinga setup?
Most voters played around with Icinga for some time with their setup, be it a few days or more. There is a lot to explore with all of the modules and monitoring plugins!

Are you using Kubernetes in your setup or planning to do so?
Another current focus is Kubernetes: 2/3 of our voters are already using, or planning to use Kubernetes in their setup.

What do you love or hate the most about the new way of filtering via text based filter editor that came with the Icinga DB module? What would you change about it?
There has been a lot of positive feedback and ideas for improvement in the comments around the filter editor. Most of the criticism centered around the lack of a method to bookmark searches.

Wednesday: Matter Makers

Have you ever published something on our central repository for all plugins, add-ons, scripts and modules: http://exchange.icinga.com?
Most voters had something they could publish chose not to do so. It’s pretty quick and easy to share your creations with others and give back to the open source community! With the GitHub OAuth integration you list your creation within minutes!

Have you heard about or seen http://translate.icinga.com before?
Not many heard of our translation platform before, so make sure to check it out! If you speak another language next to english, you can contribute translations directly from the website!

If you wanted to contribute something, would you know where to start?
Almost 50% wouldn’t know where to start contributing. Of course, a big part of that is not knowing what to do. Whether you want to write a module, add a cool theme, write a blogpost, or help to translate Icinga, there are a lot of different ways! If you need some help, a lot of our projects on GitHub have a CONTRIBUTING.md that can help you get started – or you can ask for help on the forum!

What motivated you to start contributing to the Icinga project, and how did you get started?
Everyone has a different reason for contributing to the project, from wanting to give something back, to learning more by contributing, to making your and everyones life easier. Whatever your reason may be, we’re happy to see your contributions!

What challenges have you encountered while trying to contribute to Icinga, and how did you overcome them?
When it comes to the challenges, there was no single one standing out. I hope this means, that there is no major roadblock, but more of a collections of smaller improvements that can be made. With the help of the people that commented on this question, we already found a few places to start!

Thursday: Resource Rockstars

How easily can you find what you need in the Icinga Documentation?
The results to this question was a bit better than last year – so it looks like we’re moving in the right direction! There are of course a lot of improvements still to be made – and we are constantly working on making it better! If you find something that you think is off, you can jump straight to the repostitory from our docs to open an issue or a pull request about it!

Would you be open to organize an Icinga Meetup?
Some of our voters are interested in hosting, most are interested in visiting! All you need to do to organize a Meetup is to contact us via our contact form and we will help you get set up!

What is holding you back from attending an Icinga Event?
We were glad to hear that location and time are the things holding you back the most from attending. After the global event hiatus in the past few years, we’re starting to organize more events across the world again. So hopefully there will be one coming near you in the future!

 

Our Heroes

This year, we voted for our community heroes again! These are the people voted by you and the Icinga team for their outstanding contributions to the project. May we present:

Forum Healer

For our first day with the Theme “Community Club” the hero we were looking for was a person that was very involved in our community forum.
log1c got this hero title this year again, for his continuous efforts in the community forum! He’s been very active helping out other users and also making sure the forum stays civil as a moderator. He’s the first person to receive a second hero title in a row, and this is well deserved! Thank you for your kindness and diplomacy. You make the forum a better place to be!

Product Explorer

Our second day ran under the flag of “Product Party”, where we were looking for someone who helped us improve our products by testing, giving feedback and being fostering our discussions on GitHub.
Dominik Riva has been doing a lot for Icinga, testing our products, raising multiple issues, and staying on top of our releases with great feedback. A lot of modules wouldn’t be what they are without him! Next to his involvement with testing and giving feedback he is also in incredibly active member in the community forum. Thank you for your engagement!

Contribution Tinkerer

Day three of the Feedback Week was all about our “Matter Makers”, so that would be contributors that give back to the open source community with modules, plugins, and the like.
The popular vote for the best contributions from the community went to the plugin collection from Linuxfabrik. So as a collective they received the title of Contribution Tinkerer. Linuxfabrik has also collaborated with us in the form of blogposts, and giving presentations at our Icinga Camps. We want to say thank you for your great work!

Conference Bard

The fourth, and last, day of this year’s Feedback Week ran under the banner of “Resource Rockstars”, and we were looking for a hero that isn’t afraid to step into the spotlight to share their knowledge!
Moreamazingnick has been bestowed with the title of Conference Bard. He’s been participating in our Community Calls, and will share his knowledge on stage at Icinga Camp, sharing his bardic inspiration with us. His activity in the forum is also outstanding, helping out new and old users with their problems and making everyones day. Thank you for inspiring us to do better!

 

So, thanks again for making Icinga what it is and for being part of the Community. Whether hero, silent reader, active contributor or background supporter: we appreciate every single one of you and are proud to have a Community like this one!