Upgrading Icinga 2 ¶

Upgrading Icinga 2 is usually quite straightforward. Ordinarily the only manual steps involved are scheme updates for the IDO database.

Specific version upgrades are described below. Please note that version updates are incremental. An upgrade from v2.6 to v2.8 requires to follow the instructions for v2.7 too.

Upgrading to v2.10 ¶

2.10.5 Packages ¶

EOL distributions where no packages are available with 2.10.5:

SLES 11
Ubuntu 14 LTS

Path Constant Changes ¶

During package upgrades you may see a notice that the configuration content of features has changed. This is due to a more general approach with path constants in v2.10.

The known constants SysconfDir and LocalStateDir stay intact and won’t break on upgrade. If you are using these constants in your own custom command definitions or other objects, you are advised to revise them and update them according to the documentation.

Example diff:

object NotificationCommand "mail-service-notification" {
-  command = [ SysconfDir + "/icinga2/scripts/mail-service-notification.sh" ]
+  command = [ ConfigDir + "/scripts/mail-service-notification.sh" ]

If you have the ICINGA2_RUN_DIR environment variable configured in the sysconfig file, you need to rename it to ICINGA2_INIT_RUN_DIR. ICINGA2_STATE_DIR has been removed and this setting has no effect.

Note

This is important if you rely on the sysconfig configuration in your own scripts.

New Constants ¶

New Icinga constants have been added in this release.

Environment for specifying the Icinga environment. Defaults to not set.
ApiBindHost and ApiBindPort to allow overriding the default ApiListener values. This will be used for an Icinga addon only.

Configuration: Namespaces ¶

The keywords namespace and using are now reserved for the namespace functionality provided with v2.10. Read more about how it works here.

Configuration: ApiListener ¶

Anonymous JSON-RPC connections in the cluster can now be configured with max_anonymous_clients attribute. The corresponding REST API results from /v1/status/ApiListener in json_rpc have been renamed from clients to anonymous_clients to better reflect their purpose. Authenticated clients are counted as connected endpoints. A similar change is there for the performance data metrics.

The TLS handshake timeout defaults to 10 seconds since v2.8.2. This can now be configured with the configuration attribute tls_handshake_timeout. Beware of performance issues with setting a too high value.

API: schedule-downtime Action ¶

The attribute child_options was previously accepting 0,1,2 for specific child downtime settings. This behaviour stays intact, but the new proposed way are specific constants as values (DowntimeNoChildren, DowntimeTriggeredChildren, DowntimeNonTriggeredChildren).

Notifications: Recovery and Acknowledgement ¶

When a user should be notified on Problem and Acknowledgement, v2.10 now checks during the Acknowledgement notification event whether this user has been notified about a problem before.

  types = [ Problem, Acknowledgement, Recovery ]

If no Problem notification was sent, and the types filter includes problems for this user, the Acknowledgement notification is not sent.

In contrast to that, the following configuration always sends Acknowledgement notifications.

  types = [ Acknowledgement, Recovery ]

This change also restores the old behaviour for Recovery notifications. The above configuration leaving out the Problem type can be used to only receive recovery notifications. If Problem is added to the types again, Icinga 2 checks whether it has notified a user of a problem when sending the recovery notification.

More details can be found in this PR.

Stricter configuration validation¶

Some config errors are now fatal. While it never worked before, icinga2 refuses to start now!

For example the following started to give a fatal error in 2.10:

  object Zone "XXX" {
    endpoints = [ "master-server" ]
    parent = "global-templates"
  }

critical/config: Error: Zone 'XXX' can not have a global zone as parent.

Package Changes ¶

Debian/Ubuntu drops the libicinga2 package. apt-get upgrade icinga2 won’t remove such packages leaving the upgrade in an unsatisfied state.

Please use apt-get full-upgrade or apt-get dist-upgrade instead, as explained here.

On RHEL/CentOS/Fedora, icinga2-libs has been obsoleted. Unfortunately yum’s dependency resolver doesn’t allow to install older versions than 2.10 then. Please read here for details.

RPM packages dropped the Classic UI package in v2.8, Debian/Ubuntu packages were forgotten. This is now the case with this release. Icinga 1.x is EOL by the end of 2018, plan your migration to Icinga Web 2.

Upgrading to v2.9 ¶

Deprecation and Removal Notes ¶

Deprecation of 1.x compatibility features: StatusDataWriter, CompatLogger, CheckResultReader. Their removal is scheduled for 2.11. Icinga 1.x is EOL and will be out of support by the end of 2018.
Removal of Icinga Studio. It always has been experimental and did not satisfy our high quality standards. We’ve therefore removed it.

Sysconfig Changes ¶

The security fixes in v2.8.2 required moving specific runtime settings into the Sysconfig file and environment. This included that Icinga 2 would itself parse this file and read the required variables. This has generated numerous false-positive log messages and led to many support questions. v2.9.0 changes this in the standard way to read these variables from the environment, and use sane compile-time defaults.

Note

In order to upgrade, remove everything in the sysconfig file and re-apply your changes.

There is a bug with existing sysconfig files where path variables are not expanded because systemd does not support shell variable expansion. This worked with SysVInit though.

Edit the sysconfig file and either remove everything, or edit this line on RHEL 7. Modify the path for other distributions.

vim /etc/sysconfig/icinga2

-ICINGA2_PID_FILE=$ICINGA2_RUN_DIR/icinga2/icinga2.pid
+ICINGA2_PID_FILE=/run/icinga2/icinga2.pid

If you want to adjust the number of open files for the Icinga application for example, you would just add this setting like this on RHEL 7:

vim /etc/sysconfig/icinga2

ICINGA2_RLIMIT_FILES=50000

Restart Icinga 2 afterwards, the systemd service file automatically puts the value into the application’s environment where this is read on startup.

Setup Wizard Changes ¶

Client and satellite setups previously had the example configuration in conf.d included by default. This caused trouble on config sync, or with locally executed checks generating wrong check results for command endpoint clients.

In v2.9.0 node wizard, node setup and the graphical Windows wizard will disable the inclusion by default. You can opt-out and explicitly enable it again if needed.

In addition to the default global zones global-templates and director-global, the setup wizards also offer to specify your own custom global zones and generate the required configuration automatically.

The setup wizards also use full qualified names for Zone and Endpoint object generation, either the default values (FQDN for clients) or the user supplied input. This removes the dependency on the NodeName and ZoneName constant and helps to immediately see the parent-child relationship. Those doing support will also see the benefit in production.

CLI Command Changes ¶

The node setup parameter --master_host was deprecated and replaced with --parent_host. This parameter is now optional to allow connection-less client setups similar to the node wizard CLI command. The parent_zone parameter has been added to modify the parent zone name e.g. for client-to-satellite setups.

The api user command which was released in v2.8.2 turned out to cause huge problems with configuration validation, windows restarts and OpenSSL versions. It is therefore removed in 2.9, the password_hash attribute for the ApiUser object stays intact but has no effect. This is to ensure that clients don’t break on upgrade. We will revise this feature in future development iterations.

Configuration Changes ¶

The CORS attributes access_control_allow_credentials, access_control_allow_headers and access_control_allow_methods are now controlled by Icinga 2 and cannot be changed anymore.

Unique Generated Names ¶

With the removal of RHEL 5 as supported platform, we can finally use real unique IDs. This is reflected in generating names for e.g. API stage names. Previously it was a handcrafted mix of local FQDN, timestamps and random numbers.

Custom Vars not updating ¶

A rare issue preventing the custom vars of objects created prior to 2.9.0 being updated when changed may occur. To remedy this, truncate the customvar tables and restart Icinga 2. The following is an example of how to do this with mysql:

$ mysql -uroot -picinga icinga
MariaDB [icinga]> truncate icinga_customvariables;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)
MariaDB [icinga]> truncate icinga_customvariablestatus;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)
MariaDB [icinga]> exit
Bye
$ sudo systemctl restart icinga2

Custom vars should now stay up to date.

Upgrading to v2.8.2 ¶

With version 2.8.2 the location of settings formerly found in /etc/icinga2/init.conf has changed. They are now located in the sysconfig, /etc/sysconfig/icinga2 (RPM) or /etc/default/icinga2 (DPKG) on most systems. The init.conf file has been removed and its settings will be ignored. These changes are only relevant if you edited the init.conf. Below is a table displaying the new names for the affected settings.

Old `init.conf`	New `sysconfig/icinga2`
RunAsUser	ICINGA2_USER
RunAsGroup	ICINGA2_GROUP
RLimitFiles	ICINGA2_RLIMIT_FILES
RLimitProcesses	ICINGA2_RLIMIT_PROCESSES
RLimitStack	ICINGA2_RLIMIT_STACK

Upgrading to v2.8 ¶

DB IDO Schema Update to 2.8.0 ¶

There are additional indexes and schema fixes which require an update.

Please proceed here for MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Note

2.8.1.sql fixes a unique constraint problem with fresh 2.8.0 installations. You don’t need this update if you are upgrading from an older version.

Changed Certificate Paths ¶

The default certificate path was changed from /etc/icinga2/pki to /var/lib/icinga2/certs.

Old Path	New Path
`/etc/icinga2/pki/icinga2-client1.localdomain.crt`	`/var/lib/icinga2/certs/icinga2-client1.localdomain.crt`
`/etc/icinga2/pki/icinga2-client1.localdomain.key`	`/var/lib/icinga2/certs/icinga2-client1.localdomain.key`
`/etc/icinga2/pki/ca.crt`	`/var/lib/icinga2/certs/ca.crt`

This applies to Windows clients in the same way: %ProgramData%\etc\icinga2\pki was moved to %ProgramData%\var\lib\icinga2\certs.

Old Path	New Path
`%ProgramData%\etc\icinga2\pki\icinga2-client1.localdomain.crt`	`%ProgramData%\var\lib\icinga2\certs\icinga2-client1.localdomain.crt`
`%ProgramData%\etc\icinga2\pki\icinga2-client1.localdomain.key`	`%ProgramData%\var\lib\icinga2\certs\icinga2-client1.localdomain.key`
`%ProgramData%\etc\icinga2\pki\ca.crt`	`%ProgramData%\var\lib\icinga2\certs\ca.crt`

Note

The default expected path for client certificates is /var/lib/icinga2/certs/ + NodeName + {.crt,.key}. The NodeName constant is usually the FQDN and certificate common name (CN). Check the conventions section inside the Distributed Monitoring chapter.

The setup CLI commands and the default ApiListener configuration have been adjusted to these paths too.

The ApiListener object attributes cert_path, key_path and ca_path have been deprecated and removed from the example configuration.

Migration Path ¶

Note

Icinga 2 automatically migrates the certificates to the new default location if they are configured and detected in /etc/icinga2/pki.

During startup, the migration kicks in and ensures to copy the certificates to the new location. This will also happen if someone updates the certificate files in /etc/icinga2/pki to ensure that the new certificate location always has the latest files.

This has been implemented in the Icinga 2 binary to ensure it works on both Linux/Unix and the Windows platform.

If you are not using the built-in CLI commands and setup wizards to deploy the client certificates, please ensure to update your deployment tools/scripts. This mainly affects

Puppet modules
Ansible playbooks
Chef cookbooks
Salt recipes
Custom scripts, e.g. Windows Powershell or self-made implementations

In order to support a smooth migration between versions older than 2.8 and future releases, the built-in certificate migration path is planned to exist as long as the deprecated ApiListener object attributes exist.

You are safe to use the existing configuration paths inside the api feature.

Example

Look at the following example taken from the Director Linux deployment script for clients.

Ensure that the default certificate path is changed from /etc/icinga2/pki to /var/lib/icinga2/certs.

-ICINGA2_SSL_DIR="${ICINGA2_CONF_DIR}/pki"
+ICINGA2_SSL_DIR="${ICINGA2_STATE_DIR}/lib/icinga2/certs"

Remove the ApiListener configuration attributes.

object ApiListener "api" {
-  cert_path = SysconfDir + "/icinga2/pki/${ICINGA2_NODENAME}.crt"
-  key_path = SysconfDir + "/icinga2/pki/${ICINGA2_NODENAME}.key"
-  ca_path = SysconfDir + "/icinga2/pki/ca.crt"
  accept_commands = true
  accept_config = true
}

Test the script with a fresh client installation before putting it into production.

Tip

Please support module and script developers in their migration. If you find any project which would require these changes, create an issue or a patchset in a PR and help them out. Thanks in advance!

On-Demand Signing and CA Proxy ¶

Icinga 2 v2.8 supports the following features inside the cluster:

Forward signing requests from clients through a satellite instance to a signing master (“CA Proxy”).
Signing requests without a ticket. The master instance allows to list and sign CSRs (“On-Demand Signing”).

In order to use these features, all instances must be upgraded to v2.8.

More details in this chapter.

Windows Client ¶

Windows versions older than Windows 10/Server 2016 require the Universal C Runtime for Windows.

Removed Bottom Up Client Mode ¶

This client mode was deprecated in 2.6 and was removed in 2.8.

The node CLI command does not provide list or update-config anymore.

Note

The old migration guide can be found on GitHub.

The clients don’t need to have a local conf.d directory included.

Icinga 2 continues to run with the generated and imported configuration. You are advised to migrate any existing configuration to the “top down” mode with the help of the Icinga Director or config management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, etc.

Removed Classic UI Config Package ¶

The config meta package classicui-config and the configuration files have been removed. You need to manually configure this legacy interface. Create a backup of the configuration before upgrading and re-configure it afterwards.

Flapping Configuration ¶

Icinga 2 v2.8 implements a new flapping detection algorithm which splits the threshold configuration into low and high settings.

flapping_threshold is deprecated and does not have any effect when flapping is enabled. Please remove flapping_threshold from your configuration. This attribute will be removed in v2.9.

Instead you need to use the flapping_threshold_low and flapping_threshold_high attributes. More details can be found here.

Deprecated Configuration Attributes ¶

Object	Attribute
ApiListener	cert_path (migration happens)
ApiListener	key_path (migration happens)
ApiListener	ca_path (migration happens)
Host, Service	flapping_threshold (has no effect)

Upgrading to v2.7 ¶

v2.7.0 provided new notification scripts and commands. Please ensure to update your configuration accordingly. An advisory has been published here.

In case are having troubles with OpenSSL 1.1.0 and the public CA certificates, please read this advisory and check the troubleshooting chapter.

If Icinga 2 fails to start with an empty reference to $ICINGA2_CACHE_DIR ensure to set it inside /etc/sysconfig/icinga2 (RHEL) or /etc/default/icinga2 (Debian).

RPM packages will put a file called /etc/sysconfig/icinga2.rpmnew if you have modified the original file.

Example on CentOS 7:

vim /etc/sysconfig/icinga2

ICINGA2_CACHE_DIR=/var/cache/icinga2

systemctl restart icinga2

Upgrading the MySQL database ¶

If you want to upgrade an existing Icinga 2 instance, check the /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/upgrade directory for incremental schema upgrade file(s).

Note

If there isn’t an upgrade file for your current version available, there’s nothing to do.

Apply all database schema upgrade files incrementally.

# mysql -u root -p icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/upgrade/<version>.sql

The Icinga 2 DB IDO feature checks the required database schema version on startup and generates an log message if not satisfied.

Example: You are upgrading Icinga 2 from version 2.4.0 to 2.8.0. Look into the upgrade directory:

$ ls /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/upgrade/
2.0.2.sql 2.1.0.sql 2.2.0.sql 2.3.0.sql 2.4.0.sql 2.5.0.sql 2.6.0.sql 2.8.0.sql

There are two new upgrade files called 2.5.0.sql, 2.6.0.sql and 2.8.0.sql which must be applied incrementally to your IDO database.

# mysql -u root -p icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/upgrade/2.5.0.sql
# mysql -u root -p icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/upgrade/2.6.0.sql
# mysql -u root -p icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/upgrade/2.8.0.sql

Upgrading the PostgreSQL database ¶

If you want to upgrade an existing Icinga 2 instance, check the /usr/share/icinga2-ido-pgsql/schema/upgrade directory for incremental schema upgrade file(s).

Note

If there isn’t an upgrade file for your current version available, there’s nothing to do.

Apply all database schema upgrade files incrementally.

# export PGPASSWORD=icinga
# psql -U icinga -d icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-pgsql/schema/upgrade/<version>.sql

The Icinga 2 DB IDO feature checks the required database schema version on startup and generates an log message if not satisfied.

Example: You are upgrading Icinga 2 from version 2.4.0 to 2.8.0. Look into the upgrade directory:

$ ls /usr/share/icinga2-ido-pgsql/schema/upgrade/
2.0.2.sql 2.1.0.sql 2.2.0.sql 2.3.0.sql 2.4.0.sql 2.5.0.sql 2.6.0.sql 2.8.0.sql

There are two new upgrade files called 2.5.0.sql, 2.6.0.sql and 2.8.0.sql which must be applied incrementally to your IDO database.

# export PGPASSWORD=icinga
# psql -U icinga -d icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-pgsql/schema/upgrade/2.5.0.sql
# psql -U icinga -d icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-pgsql/schema/upgrade/2.6.0.sql
# psql -U icinga -d icinga < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-pgsql/schema/upgrade/2.8.0.sql