Berlin, Berlin … on a rainy Monday fellow Icinga team members took the long road to lovely Berlin. We were super excited to meet community members and soon-to-be Icinga users in the wonderful spot in Berlin, namely the Kalkscheune. Bernd invited us to go for the traditional “Curry Wurst” at Curry 36, including the emergency cheeseburger and some Dunkin’ donuts afterwards. We’ve also promised to grant a bottle of Gin to the last sold ticket, so we’ve got a Bulldog Gin too. We’ve then tasted the Adler Gin in our Motel One – so you’re right, Gin totally is part of the Icinga community 🙂
Tuesday morning getting up early, preparing the location. It went smooth and so Bernd started the day with a short introduction about the Icinga project and how many users we already have. We certainly need your feedback – please tell us that you are using Icinga. We love to see Icinga being appreciated all over the world 🙂
Bernd further announced a new cloud service by NETWAYS called NWS – Netways Web Services. This includes master and satellite setups for Icinga 2, including Icinga Web 2, Director, Grafana just one click away.
Icinga Camp Berlin wouldn’t have been possible without our sponsors AZ IT-Systems, NETWAYS, Thomas-Krenn, Würth Phoenix and Open Infrastructure – THANK YOU. Thomas-Krenn kindly sponsored a raffle contest and Francesco who joined us with Alyvix just won (ok, they had to count down from 50 until Julia found him ;-)). Again thanks to our community speakers Sven Nierlein, Werner Fischer, Mattis Haase, Francesco Melchiori and Eduard Güldner who made this event an inspiring one for future developments and integrations.
Special thanks this time to Marco and Marianne for sharing their thoughts on Icinga Camp Berlin already.
Web interfaces, customizations and integrations
Ever wanted to know how to write your own Icinga Web 2 module? Watch Eric’s talk and get to code! Oh, and have a Gin while hacking 😉
Looking for alternative dashboards, reporting capabilities and what not? Check out Sven’s presentation diving into Thruk. Sven also announced a FreeBSD port for Thruk after leaving Icinga Camp.
Tom bravely mastered to present the Icinga Director in only 45 minutes. There’s lots of new things you probably already know (since you’re using git master ;)). Fun fact – we’ve discussed a setup with Puppet and the Icinga Director during lunch. Right then Tom had the PuppetDB module as additional import source at hand.
You’ve got Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 installed on your monitoring infrastructure, what’s next? Michael presented lots of tools and integrations in his talk. Automation with Puppet, Chef, Ansible combined with the Icinga Director, Metric collection with Graphite, InfluxDB and Grafana, Event correlation with Elastic Stack and Graylog. He also had the upcoming icingabeat ready inside the live demo, play around with it! Next to well known Icinga Web 2 modules such as Business Process or Cube, Michael also shared community modules worth a look into: Grafana and Globe by Carsten, sitting in the audience and smiling all the way. Oh, and custom notification scripts enhanced with Grafana graphs – Morgan was happy too 🙂
Checks and Configuration
We’ve also learned lots of tips & tricks about hardware monitoring in Werner’s presentation. Further make sure to checkout the GitHub repo by Thomas-Krenn which provides hardware monitoring plugins. Oh, and certainly watch Werner’s talk you should 😉
Francesco dives into end-to-end monitoring and analysing the user experience. He’s also one of the developers of Alyvix and provides insights on that in his talk.
If you’ve always struggled to write the “best” monitoring check plugin, you’ll get well entertained by Matthis Haase and his journey from “the notification text message just sucks, f*cking plugin devs” to “fixing the problem because I know what’s going on”. You know that, you’ve probably been waken up at 3am in the morning by some critical Icinga alert, weren’t you?
If you don’t want to write yet another check plugin, but already have all the data in memory as in metrics/performance data … well, listen and learn in Eduard’s talk. He’s really into the Icinga 2 DSL and its programmatic capabilities. Executing dummy checks which just collect all the objects in memory, parse their performance data and then return output and metrics for your own dashboards and notifications? To me, that is the most hilarious talk I’ve ever seen, and it really makes us proud what users achieve with Icinga 2.
What’s next?
You’ve seen so many new things you can achieve with Icinga and all around it, that’s like Ron said “all (new) things icinga feel like christmas to me so I can’t wait to unwrap the presents 😉 …”. Rest assured that we’ll take care of updating our website with many new integrations. We’re also planning for blog posts on further integrations and the lovely community modules for Icinga Web 2 🙂
Let’s just pretend I were a new Icinga user, what should I do in the next days?
- Setup the Elastic Stack and try icingabeat – installation is a breeze, there are packages available. Let us know how it goes.
- Check out the Icinga Web 2 modules and add your feature requests to their GitHub repos
- Business Process
- Cube
- Grafana – Jan did it already.
- Globe
- Watch Eric’s talk again and create your own Icinga Web 2 module!
- Look into automation & play with the Puppet module or Chef cookbook
- Install the Icinga Director and add your own import sources, e.g. PuppetDB or Fileshipper. Blog & tweet about it!
- Review your check plugin output and performance data. There might be room for improvements.
- Enhance your notification scripts, add Grafana graphs and more details for anyone being on-call.
Many of these things are available inside the Vagrant Boxes, but you are invited to try it out yourself and share your story. Blog about it, tweet and let community members know about all the awesome stuff you’ve learned at Icinga Camp Berlin!
It really was a great event and we’ve enjoyed the day together with our lovely community. Thank you for joining our Icinga Camp, we’ll make sure to come back in 2018 (to be announced, Marianne already prepares her talk ;)). Meanwhile consider vacation in India combined with our Icinga Camp in Bangalore on 13.5.2017! 🙂
Slides are available on Slideshare and our presentation archive. More pictures can be found in our community pictures archive. The videos have been uploaded to our Youtube channel.
On a personal note – thanks for tweeting, trending in Germany 🙂 #icingacamp
