Blog
Icinga 2.10 released: Namespaces, Notifications, TLS Performance
Our friends from the Max-Planck-Institut for Marine Mikrobiologie kindly sponsored that acknowledgement notifications are now sent only to users which have been notified about a problem before – thanks a lot. Another sponsor asked for more child options for the ScheduledDowntime which are now released in 2.10.
2.10 also brings support for namespaces and allows us to keep the “globals” namespace clean. In addition to that, user-defined namespaces are possible and can be imported into the global namespace too. Read more about this feature here. An additional DSL feature is the support for references. You’ll also find new fine granular path constants in this release, e.g. ConfigDir instead of SysconfDir + “/icinga2”. The old constants are still intact but deprecated.
As promised in the 2.9.2 release post, we’ve been debugging TLS connection handling with many threads and TLS timeouts in large scale environments. This release adds a dynamic thread connection pool for both, cluster messages and HTTP requests. With the performance boost granted, we’ve also lowered the cluster reconnect interval from 60 to 10 seconds. This ensures that configuration deployments triggering a reload don’t leave clients behind.
Monthly Snap September: Icinga Meetup Salzburg, OSMC & Release Updates
Our first Icinga meetup in Salzburg, Austria is happening this week. Join fellow community members :) OSMC is near, just one month to go …. meet Jan-Piet on MQTT, Claudio as a first-time speaker on container monitoring, Nicolai with infrastructure visualization and Carsten with his “Einhornmagie” :-)
Icinga 2.9.2 released
Icinga 2 v2.9 introduced performance related changes inside the configuration compilation and activation order. This was to ensure a) no unwanted notifications b) use available CPU resources to speed up the overall validation process. These changes had a bad effect on configuration depending on a specific activation order, and slowed it down with many config objects of a specific type. The Icinga Director depends on get_host() being called in service objects to support specific service set overrides. In case you’re having trouble here, v2.9.2 is for you.
Icinga 2 DSL Feature: Namespaces coming in v2.10
Under the hood, Icinga 2 uses many constants and reserved keywords, e.g. “Critical” or “Zone” which are respected by the config parser and compiler. This sometimes leads to errors when users accidentally override such things, or re-define their own global constants. v2.10 introduces namespaces for this purpose, and ensures that such accidents won’t happen anymore.
What exactly is a namespace?
Think of a defined “room” for variables, functions, etc. which can be defined similar to constants. They are isolated from other namespaces and must be loaded by the user/developer. Namespaces need a defined name – we prefer to use a capitalized string, e.g. “MyNamespace”. This helps to immediately qualify this as customization when reading the configuration.
Icinga 2 v2.10 uses namespaces which are registered and loaded by default. In order to test this, open the debug console on a test VM which has the snapshot packages installed. Fetch the keys in global namespace “globals” first.
Monthly Snap August: Icinga Camp Tel Aviv, OSMC Schedule, Icinga 2 Book & Releases
Our first Icinga Camp Tel Aviv happens on December 17th, 2018, the fourth edition in Berlin takes place on March 14th, 2019 again :)
The first Icinga meetup in Salzburg, Austria happens on Oct 12th, 2018 – join for more #icingalove. The Berlin meetup was a great success, Carsten and Lennart joined there too. Watch their meetup group for future dates.
The OSMC 2018 schedule is online, with so many interesting talks in two days on three tracks. The hackathon on the last day is also back for more #icingalove.
Watch out for future Icinga trainings by our partners. There’s a new workshop available by NETWAYS which practices automated setups with Puppet and Icinga.
This month brought many releases: Icinga Web 2.6.1 as bugfix release, Graphite module 1.1 and Director 1.5. Icinga joined the OpenAPM initiative in August, you can learn more about it at OSMC later this year. We’ve also learned that Icinga is now an official input for InfluxDB’s Telegraf.
Carsten released v1.3.0 of the Grafana module for Icinga Web 2. Claudio shared insights into pinning checks in HA enabled cluster zones. Our partner NETWAYS has uploaded their webinar on building an Icinga 2 environment. Bernd updated his blog post series on monitoring tools which includes Icinga (obviously ^_^).
When the Icinga 2 book v2.0 got released, you are doing crazy things …. you’ll pause your vacation and drive 140 km … or you’ll wait and take it with you … sit at home and wait like xmas … compare the size, it is huge … feel motivated in a new week … and just love it.
Nagstamon turned 10 this month, cheerio ? Gunnar provided a patch for Icinga 2 which adds references, crazy shit. The monitoring plugins team and community members are working on check_curl replacing check_http at some point. Why would time be wrong, monitored with Icinga? ;)
Thank you Sascha for the nice view with the Icinga 2 book!