Maybe I’ll sound a bit too dramatic, but I am feeling really proud when I realize how far the Icinga project has come and what impact it made in the open source monitoring community.
6 years ago we started our journey and forked from Nagios. A software that we loved, but also experienced its technical limitations and general lack of vision. It was a tough call, but as people who lived and breathed in this technology space, we knew that it had to be done. Because Icinga was easy to implement and users experienced that it was constantly improved, they believed in its future. And so Icinga became a great success.
However in 2013 we were facing another difficult decision, because we realised that despite the significant improvements we had already made, we needed to go further in order to change #monitoringsucks back to #monitoringlove. So we decided to completely part with the old and restraining code base and to completely rewrite Icinga from scratch. But with great power comes great responsibility and the major challenge was to identify the elements of Icinga that needed to be changed and the ones that needed to be untouched, because the users loved them. The configuration style is one example where we decided to break up with our roots; but it had to be done in order to make Icinga ready for the future.
And you, our users are awesome and proved us right. We never expected that Icinga 2 would be adopted so fast and we were absolutely stunned to learn that many of you migrated to Icinga 2 before we had even released the first stable version. Today, at version 2.3.8 and the upcoming release of Icinga Web 2, everyone in the team works very hard in making Icinga a great foundation for the years to come and the best fully open source monitoring solution there is.
While we put huge efforts into the Icinga documentation, provide knowledge transfer through our Icinga Camps, and community support in the mailing lists, more and more people and businesses around the world approach us because they need professional services around Icinga. At the same time we get inquiries from IT companies that want to provide services around Icinga and seek to be listed on our website so that potential customers can find them. This is great, because when someone bases part of their business on our plattform, it means we are doing the right thing and we want to bring this to the next level in order to best support the community.
Helping our users to find qualified service providers in their area and supporting companies to base their business on Icinga is one of our strategic focuses for the upcoming years. Because of this we’ve spent the last weeks talking to many of our users, team-members, potential partners, and Icinga friends to come up with a model that is transparent, useful, easy to handle, and creates value for everyone involved and today we announce our new Icinga Partner Program.
We are especially happy that all the service providers we talked to and who helped us shape the program also decided to enrol and support our effort from the beginning: With Gridshield in Costa Rica, Inuits in Belgium, NETWAYS in Germany, Shadow-Soft in the US, and OlinData in the Netherlands, Singapore and India, we can cover most parts of the world starting today.
We will work together with them to spread the word about Icinga and offer official Icinga training, support, and professional services to the Icinga community. Find out more about those services provided by our partners here.
Please note that there is no and never will be a commercial version of Icinga. All parts of Icinga will always remain 100% open source and free of any licensing cost. For any questions, comments, ideas, or any information you want to know about our partner program, please get in touch with us. If you are a service provider and consider to enrol, check out the details of the program and apply here.
