Customer Story

The Challenge

As a system integrator and manufacturer of core components, Rohde & Schwarz offers turnkey solutions by both integrating its own components as well as third-party tools. In their Technology Systems Division, the company bundles technological system expertise and resources to deliver products for communications, reconnaissance and security systems for armed forces, security authorities as well as operators of critical infrastructures. These client solutions range from small-scale setups to nationwide interconnected systems.

Monitoring Sensitive Sites

Icinga is used in the departments Critical Infrastructure and Secure Communications. Complete solutions are built according to customer requirements. Application areas include for example Naval Communication Solutions, as well as communication and signal intelligence for police and border control.

Over the last few decades, communication on navy ships has evolved into a complex matter. It goes beyond traditional voice communication between ships and shore stations. It now encompasses tactical data transmission and onboard communication among soldiers. With a crew of 250 members, effective coordination and secure communication channels are imperative. Rohde & Schwarz is a technology leader in providing solutions to address all these requirements.

Incorporating Icinga into Turnkey Systems

The systems consist of Rohde & Schwarz devices and software solutions, as well as solutions from other manufacturers including IT and network hardware, possibly vehicles, or even complete building infrastructure. Rohde & Schwarz provides everything as a one-stop solution, allowing the customer to get up and running quickly and easily.

To fit their specific needs, Rohde & Schwarz expands Icinga by integrating components and features and then incorporates those into their systems. The overall solution is called “RS CHM”. Rohde & Schwarz doesn’t hide that Icinga is running underneath – it is openly named on the product’s About page – while the interface itself is tailored and branded as RS CHM.

Ralph Schmeisser, Product Owner Systems Status Monitoring, recounts how they began using Icinga1 10 years ago and switched 4 years ago from Icinga1 to Icinga2 as base for “RS CHM”. Within the development team several customizations were implemented in order to fullfil the various customers’ needs during that time. The same team supports deployment and maintenance phases in the customers’ installations, ensuring a smooth hand-over from R&D to operation.

Icinga monitoring runs at the customer’s site because external access to the systems is not desired for critical infrastructure.

In such customer projects, the infrastructure is set up once and remains largely unchanged. For the subsequent operation, the customer is responsible. Typically, they enter a long-term support contract with Rohde & Schwarz for for several years. A Navy ship project can range over 15 or more years, so using a closed-source application means a high risk for a vendor lock-in.

High Flexibility and Integrability

The challenge for Rohde & Schwarz was to find a highly flexible infrastructure monitoring tool that could be integrated with various components. Ralph Schmeisser explains, “There were several products from Rohde & Schwarz and third-party components that provided system status information, but there was no solution with a single interface showing the status of all the devices and components in one interface. That was unacceptable for such complex systems.”

To address this challenge, Ralph Schmeisser looked to the open-source world. The key requirements for the new monitoring tool were maximum flexibility in integration options, high scalability, and the ability to implement a distributed monitoring strategy. On top of that they wanted to avoid vendor lock-in. Ralph explains the value of an open-source solution for them: “We can build and patch the software ourselves and are not dependent on others. We highly appreciate working with the community; response times on Github are usually very quick.”

The Solution

Success

Broad Usability

Rohde & Schwarz is very content both with Icinga’s performance and flexibility for theirvarious use cases. While the Rohde & Schwarz components track a missing person’s mobile phone signal in radio detection or captures foreign radio signals, Icinga comprehensively monitors RS devices and environmental conditions, Dell servers, Lancom switches, door contact sensors, temperature sensors, diesel generator fuel levels, air conditioning, UPS units, as well as various software components. This includes monitoring all databases and their fill levels, as well as all processes.

Traditional notifications are not required because the client systems are isolated from external interfaces, meaning they cannot communicate externally for security reasons. However, Rohde & Schwarz has developed a notification GUI that queries the Icinga API and shows status changes. This allows for alarms in Windows without the need to keep a web browser open. Additionally, they have implemented an aggregation logic to deliver
condensed status information to combat management and other systems via SNMP.

Two Years On: Towards Unified, Headless Workflows

Since the original story was published, Rohde & Schwarz has been working on making “RS CHM” fit even more seamlessly into customers’ day-to-day operations. Complex use cases often involve several applications running side by side – CHM being just one of them – and operators previously had to switch between them to get a full picture.

Rohde & Schwarz is therefore moving towards a headless approach: rather than relying solely on the Icinga Web frontend, monitoring data is increasingly surfaced through a dedicated API layer and embedded directly into other applications. Icinga itself keeps running in the background as the monitoring engine, while the customer works within a single, consistently designed interface – without having to jump between tools.

Icinga Web will continue to be deployed for many customers, but for newer requirements, this unified, single-application experience is becoming the norm – improving day-to-day workflows for operators without asking them to learn a new tool.

Balancing Security, Features and Stability

Security updates have become an increasingly important topic for Rohde & Schwarz’s customers, and the team ensures these are integrated and rolled out reliably. Feature updates, on the other hand, are handled with more care: many systems – a single class of navy ships can take 8 to 10 years to build – need their user interface to stay visually unchanged for years, since crews rotate between ships and familiarity matters.

New features are still developed and shipped continuously, but access to them is controlled through Icinga Web’s permission concept, so that existing customers see minimal disruption to how they operate the system while the underlying capabilities – “what happens under the hood” – are kept up to date.

Updates typically move through several stages before reaching a live system: Rohde & Schwarz first tests a new release internally as a full system solution, then it is validated in the customer’s integration environment, often followed by an offline staging system on the customer’s side. Because many systems are deployed on ships that operate offline, updates are usually installed during scheduled maintenance windows, for example when a ship is in port.

Metrics and Open Standards

For performance and trend data – such as temperature curves or disk usage over time – Rohde & Schwarz currently relies on Graphite integration. With the wider industry moving towards containers, Grafana is increasingly coming into focus, and a future shift in that direction is not ruled out.

Rohde & Schwarz also welcomed two recent additions to Icinga: OpenTelemetry support and OpenID Connect support.

OpenTelemetry support is not yet actively used in production, but the team is pleased about the announcement, since it gives users more choice in where they want to route and view their metrics. Similarly, OpenID Connect is seen as a promising direction for the future: Rohde & Schwarz currently uses Kerberos-based Single Sign-On together with Icinga’s internal user database as an option, and a ready-made, well-designed OpenID Connect integration would mean they no longer have to build and maintain their own authentication module for Icinga Web.

Outlook: Moving Towards Containers

Until now, Icinga and the wider “RS CHM” solution have typically been deployed natively or on virtual machines. Migrating towards containers and Kubernetes is the next major topic on the roadmap for the coming months, as customer demand for this shift is steadily increasing, mirroring a trend already visible in more traditional industries such as insurance.

For components that are heavily customised, such as Icinga Web in its current form, Rohde & Schwarz expects to keep building its own container images. For other parts of the stack, such as the database backend, the team hopes to be able to rely on official Icinga container images largely unchanged, in order to reduce the amount of custom engineering required – though this approach is still being evaluated and not yet finalised.

Monitoring Hard- and Software Components

Ralph Schmeisser and his colleagues at Rohde & Schwarz are extremely satisfied with Icinga’s functionalities that perfectly fit their needs. They receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from their clients, who can easily spot crucial status information on the Icinga Web dashboard and always rely on the monitoring. The upgrade from Icinga 1 to Icinga 2 was a major step in enhancing the “RS CHM” solution’s performance, security, reliability, and usability- and the ongoing move towards headless, container-based deployments continues that trajectory today.