Importing Director Configurations with Baskets

Director already takes care of importing configurations for monitored objects. This same concept is also useful for Director’s internal configuration. Configuration Baskets allow you to export, import, share and restore all or parts of your Icinga Director configuration, as many times as you like.

Configuration baskets can save or restore the configurations for almost all internal Director objects, such as host groups, host templates, service sets, commands, notifications, sync rules, and much more. Because configuration baskets are supported directly in Director, all customizations included in your Director configuration are imported and exported properly. Each snapshot is a persistent, serialized (JSON) representation of all involved objects at that moment in time.

Configuration baskets allow you to: - Back up (take a snapshot) and restore a Director configuration… - To be able to restore in case of a misconfiguration you have deployed - Copy specific objects as a static JSON file to migrate them from testing to production - Understand problems stemming from your changes with a diff between two configurations - Share configurations with others, either your entire environment or just specific parts such as commands - Choose only some elements to snapshot (using a custom selection) in a given category such as a subset of Host Templates

In addition, you can script some changes with the following command:

# icingacli director basket [options]

Using Configuration Baskets

To create or use a configuration basket, select Icinga Director > Configuration Baskets. At the top of the new panel are options to: - Make a completely new configuration basket with the Create action - Make a new basket by importing a previously saved JSON file with the Upload action

At the bottom you will find the list of existing baskets and the number of snapshots in each. Selecting a basket will take you to the tabs for editing baskets and for taking snapshots.

Create a New Configuration Basket

To create or edit a configuration basket, give it a name, and then select whether each of the configuration elements should appear in snapshots for that basket. The following choices are available for each element type: - Ignore: Do not put this element in snapshots (for instance, do not include sync rules). - All of them: Put all items of this element type in snapshots (for example, all host templates). - Custom Selection: Put only specified items of this element type in a snapshot. You will have to manually mark each element on the element itself. For instance, if you have marked host templates for custom selection, then you will have to go to each of the desired host templates and select the action Add to Basket. This will cause those particular host templates to be included in the next snapshot.

Uploading and Editing Saved Baskets

If you or someone else has created a serialized JSON snapshot (see below), you can upload that basket from disk. Select the Upload action, give it a new name, use the file chooser to select the JSON file, and click on the Upload button. The new basket will appear in the list of configuration baskets.

Editing a basket is simple: Click on its name in the list of configuration baskets to edit either the basket name or else whether and how each configuration type will appear in snapshots.

Managing Snapshots

From the Snapshots panel you can create a new snapshot by clicking on the Create Snapshot button. The new snapshot should immediately appear in the table below, along with a short summary of the included types (e.g., 2x HostTemplate) and the time. If no configuration types were selected for inclusion, the summary for that row will only show a dash instead of types.

Clicking on a row summary will take you to the Snapshot panel for that snapshot, with the actions - Show Basket: Edit the basket that the snapshot was created from - Restore: Requests the target Director database; clicking on the Restore button will begin the process of restoring from the snapshot. Configuration types that are not in the snapshot will not be replaced. - Download: Saves the snapshot as a local JSON file.

followed by its creation date, checksum, and a list of all configured types (or custom selections).

For each item in that list, the keywords unchanged or new will appear to the right. Clicking on new will show the differences between the version in the snapshot and the current configuration.