Customer Story
Koofr
Koofr is a secure cloud storage for all your files. At the time that privacy is becoming a luxury, Koofr’s goal is to hold as little personal data about its users as possible. Icinga kicks in with preventing outages and data loss.
It is accessible through web, mobile, desktop applications and WebDAV. Users can access and store their files in one place with affordable Koofr plans and by connecting their Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive accounts.
Since the beginning, Icinga has been an important building block in the company’s event pipeline and an extremely stable, reliable component of the Koofr business.
Koofr is a secure, privacy-oriented and EU-based cloud storage solution, present on the market since 2013. Its name is invented from words meaning a suitcase in various European languages, symbolizing a safe place for your files.
The company’s headquarters is located in Slovenia, while the users’ data is stored in highly secured data centres across the EU, ensuring compliance with the EU privacy legislation.
The Challenge
The core business of Koofr is developing advanced, secure storage solutions for large enterprises and ISPs. Meaning, they handle and safely store large amounts of data for large companies.
A couple of years ago, the company decided to expand their offer beyond large enterprises and offer their own public cloud storage, under the Koofr brand. Why did they decide to do it even though there were huge players, like Dropbox and Google already around? Because they believed that they could offer a more private experience.
“Koofr is, in fact, the only cloud storage provider that doesn’t track its users, offering a private cloud storage experience,” says Jaka Močnik, VP of Engineering at Koofr.
Therefore, privacy of the customer’s data and information is at the very core of their values and services. Obviously, in this business, infrastructure monitoring is of critical importance to prevent any customer’s data loss due to an outage or hack or server failures. That’s where Icinga kicks in.
Our core expertise is actually how not to lose stuff.
The Solution
I was already familiar with Nagios. So Icinga just seemed the ideal and much more modern and powerful solution.
Simple and Reliable
As a cloud storage solution, Koofr have certain requirements to meet. Reliability and simple handling were the essential factors. With this in mind, the monitoring expert quickly came to Icinga.
They started out with Icinga 1 which was much like Nagios. “Then came Icinga 2 with this quite powerful and flexible configuration language, I was very pleasantly surprised with that,” Jaka Močnik says, satisfied. It allowed them to remove much of the automation of generation of config files in favour of applying services based on host data, host variables and so on.
“Compared to Nagios, Icinga’s Config language is much more flexible, there are so much more possibilities,” says Jaka Močnik.
At Koofr, physical and virtual servers are monitored in a fairly straightforward set-up and they integrate it with custom tooling own scripts. While they currently automate with their own asset management, they are thinking of using Icinga Director to make life even easier.
Most beneficial Icinga features for their use case: “The alerting part, the ability to escalate stuff. Sometimes it’s enough to just send a message to our slack to some channel. If something is really not working at all, then we send an SMS to the one responsible to wake up in the middle of the night and take a look at things. That’s something really cool.”
Also, they have it integrated with Grafana in the back for showing historical data and having a quick look at the trends. Only critical developments require a more detailed analysis.
Success
The monitoring expert gives a very positive overall feedback on working with Icinga – “It’s actually a very pleasant experience with Icinga.”
For Jaka Močnik Icinga´s biggest advantage is that it’s an easy-to-use solution, yet extremely stable, reliable and scalable.
Koofr are very optimistic about their future. They aim high and expect to grow to a much larger infrastructure. “I’m sure there will be plenty of work for Icinga!“
The biggest advantage? Icinga does precisely what I need!
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