Advanced Topics

This chapter provides details for advanced Icinga Web 2 topics.

• Global URL parameters
• VirtualHost configuration
• Content Security Policy (CSP)
• Advanced Authentication Tips
• Source installation
• Automated setup
• Kiosk Mode Configuration
• Customizing the Landing Page

Global URL Parameters

Parameters starting with _ are for development purposes only.

Parameter	Value	Description
showFullscreen	-	Hides the left menu and optimizes the layout for full screen resolution.
showCompact	-	Provides a compact view. Hides the title and upper menu. This is helpful to embed a dashboard item into an external iframe.
format	json/csv/sql	Selected views can be exported as JSON or CSV. This also is available in the upper menu. You can also export the SQL queries for manual analysis.
_dev	0/1	Whether the server should return compressed or full JS/CSS files. This helps debugging browser console errors.

Examples for showFullscreen:

http://localhost/icingaweb2/dashboard?showFullscreen http://localhost/icingaweb2/monitoring/list/services?service_problem=1&sort=service_severity&showFullscreen

Examples for showCompact:

http://localhost/icingaweb2/dashboard?showCompact&showFullscreen http://localhost/icingaweb2/monitoring/list/services?service_problem=1&sort=service_severity&showCompact

Examples for format:

http://localhost/icingaweb2/monitoring/list/services?format=json http://localhost/icingaweb2/monitoring/list/services?service_problem=1&sort=service_severity&dir=desc&format=csv

VirtualHost Configuration

This describes how to run Icinga Web 2 on your FQDN’s / entry point without any redirect to /icingaweb2.

VirtualHost Configuration for Apache

Use the setup CLI commands to generate the default Apache configuration which serves Icinga Web 2 underneath /icingaweb2.

The next steps are to create the VirtualHost configuration:

• Copy the <Directory "/usr/share/icingaweb2/public"> into the main VHost configuration. Don’t forget to correct the indent.
• Set the DocumentRoot variable to look into /usr/share/icingaweb2/public
• Modify the RewriteBase variable to use / instead of /icingaweb2

Example on RHEL/CentOS:

vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/web.icinga.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName web.icinga.com

  ## Vhost docroot
  # modified for Icinga Web 2
  DocumentRoot "/usr/share/icingaweb2/public"

  ## Rewrite rules
  RewriteEngine On

  <Directory "/usr/share/icingaweb2/public">
      Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
      AllowOverride None

      <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
          # Apache 2.4
          <RequireAll>
              Require all granted
          </RequireAll>
      </IfModule>

      <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
          # Apache 2.2
          Order allow,deny
          Allow from all
      </IfModule>

      SetEnv ICINGAWEB_CONFIGDIR "/etc/icingaweb2"

      EnableSendfile Off

      <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
          RewriteEngine on
          # modified base
          RewriteBase /
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
          RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
          RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
      </IfModule>

      <IfModule !mod_rewrite.c>
          DirectoryIndex error_norewrite.html
          ErrorDocument 404 /error_norewrite.html
      </IfModule>
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Reload Apache and open the FQDN in your web browser.

systemctl reload httpd

Content Security Policy (CSP)

Elevate your security standards to an even higher level by enabling the Content Security Policy (CSP) for Icinga Web. Enabling strict CSP can prevent your Icinga Web environment from becoming a potential target of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. After enabling this feature Icinga Web defines all the required CSP headers. Subsequently, only content coming from Icinga Web’s own origin is accepted, inline JS is prohibited, and inline CSS is accepted only if it contains the nonce set in the response header.

We decided against enabling this by default as we cannot guarantee that all the modules out there will function correctly. Therefore, you have to manually enable this policy explicitly and accept the risks that this might break some of the Icinga Web modules. Icinga Web and all it’s components listed below, on the other hand, fully support strict CSP. If that’s not the case, please submit an issue on GitHub in the respective repositories.

To enable the strict content security policy navigate to Configuration > Application and toggle “Enable strict content security policy”, or set the use_strict_csp in the config.ini.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/config.ini

[security]
use_strict_csp = "1"

Here is a list of all Icinga Web components that are capable of strict CSP.

Name	CSP supported since
Icinga DB Web	v1.1.0
Icinga Reporting	v1.0.0
Icinga IDO Reports	v0.10.1
Icinga Cube	v1.3.2
Icinga Director	v1.11.1
Icinga Business Process Modeling	v2.5.0
Icinga Certificate Monitoring	v1.3.0
Icinga PDF Export	v0.10.2
Icinga Web Jira Integration	v1.3.2
Icinga Web Graphite Integration	v1.3.0
Icinga Web GenericTTS Integration	v2.1.0
Icinga Web Nagvis Integration	v1.2.0
Icinga Web AWS Integration	v1.1.0

Advanced Authentication Tips

Manual User Creation for Database Authentication Backend

Icinga Web 2 v2.5+ uses the native password hash algorithm provided by PHP 5.6+.

In order to generate a password, run the following command with the PHP CLI >= 5.6:

php -r 'echo password_hash("yourtopsecretpassword", PASSWORD_DEFAULT);'

Please note that the hashed output changes each time. This is expected.

Insert the user into the database using the generated password hash.

INSERT INTO icingaweb_user (name, active, password_hash) VALUES ('icingaadmin', 1, '$2y$10$bEKU6.1bRYjE7wxktqfeO.IGV9pYAkDBeXEbjMFSNs26lKTI0JQ1q');

Puppet

Please do note that the $ character needs to be escaped with a leading backslash in your Puppet manifests.

Example from puppet-icingaweb2:

        exec { 'create default user':
          command     => "mysql -h '${db_host}' -P '${db_port}' -u '${db_username}' -p'${db_password}' '${db_name}' -Ns -e 'INSERT INTO icingaweb_user (name, active, password_hash) VALUES (\"icingaadmin\", 1, \"\$2y\$10\$QnXfBjl1RE6TqJcY85ZKJuP9AvAV3ont9QihMTFQ/D/vHmAWaz.lG\")'",
          refreshonly => true,
        }

Icinga Web 2 Manual Setup

If you have chosen not to run the setup wizard, you will need further knowledge about

• manual creation of the Icinga Web 2 database icingaweb2 including a default user (optional as authentication and session backend)
• additional configuration for the application
• additional configuration for the monitoring module (e.g. the IDO database and external command pipe from Icinga 2)

This comes in handy if you are planning to deploy Icinga Web 2 automatically using Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.

Warning

Read the documentation on the respective linked configuration sections before deploying the configuration manually.

If you are unsure about certain settings, use the setup wizard as described in the installation instructions once and then collect the generated configuration as well as sql dumps.

Icinga Web 2 Manual Database Setup

Create the database and add a new user as shown below for MySQL/MariaDB:

sudo mysql -p

CREATE DATABASE icingaweb2;
GRANT CREATE, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, ALTER, CREATE VIEW, INDEX, EXECUTE ON icingaweb2.* TO 'icingaweb2'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'icingaweb2';
quit

mysql -p icingaweb2 < /usr/share/icingaweb2/schema/mysql.schema.sql

Then generate a new password hash as described in the authentication docs and use it to insert a new user called icingaadmin into the database.

mysql -p icingaweb2

INSERT INTO icingaweb_user (name, active, password_hash) VALUES ('icingaadmin', 1, '$1$EzxLOFDr$giVx3bGhVm4lDUAw6srGX1');
quit

Icinga Web 2 Manual Configuration

resources.ini providing the details for the Icinga Web 2 and Icinga 2 IDO database configuration. Example for MySQL:

vim /etc/icingaweb2/resources.ini

[icingaweb2]
type                = "db"
db                  = "mysql"
host                = "localhost"
port                = "3306"
dbname              = "icingaweb2"
username            = "icingaweb2"
password            = "icingaweb2"


[icinga2]
type                = "db"
db                  = "mysql"
host                = "localhost"
port                = "3306"
dbname              = "icinga"
username            = "icinga"
password            = "icinga"

config.ini defining general application settings.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/config.ini

[logging]
log                 = "syslog"
level               = "ERROR"
application         = "icingaweb2"


[preferences]
type                = "db"
resource            = "icingaweb2"

authentication.ini for e.g. using the previously created database.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/authentication.ini

[icingaweb2]
backend             = "db"
resource            = "icingaweb2"

roles.ini granting the previously added icingaadmin user all permissions.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/roles.ini

[admins]
users               = "icingaadmin"
permissions         = "*"

Icinga Web 2 Manual Configuration Monitoring Module

config.ini defining additional security settings.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring/config.ini

[security]
protected_customvars = "*pw*,*pass*,community"

backends.ini referencing the Icinga 2 DB IDO resource.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring/backends.ini

[icinga2]
type                = "ido"
resource            = "icinga2"

commandtransports.ini defining the Icinga 2 API command transport.

vim /etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring/commandtransports.ini

[icinga2]
transport = "api"
host = "localhost"
port = "5665"
username = "api"
password = "api"

Icinga Web 2 Manual Setup Login

Finally visit Icinga Web 2 in your browser to login as icingaadmin user: /icingaweb2.

Automating the Installation of Icinga Web 2

Prior to creating your own script, please look into the official resources which may help you already:

• Puppet module
• Chef cookbook

If you are automating the installation of Icinga Web 2, you may want to skip the wizard and do things yourself. These are the steps you’d need to take assuming you are using MySQL/MariaDB. If you are using PostgreSQL please adapt accordingly. Note you need to have successfully completed the Icinga 2 installation, installed the Icinga Web 2 packages and all the other steps described above first.

1. Install PHP dependencies: php, php-intl, php-imagick, php-gd, php-mysql, php-curl, php-mbstring used by Icinga Web 2.
2. Create a database for Icinga Web 2, i.e. icingaweb2.
3. Import the database schema: mysql -D icingaweb2 < /usr/share/icingaweb2/schema/mysql.schema.sql.
4. Insert administrator user in the icingaweb2 database: INSERT INTO icingaweb_user (name, active, password_hash) VALUES ('admin', 1, '<hash>'), where <hash> is the output of php -r 'echo password_hash("yourtopsecretpassword", PASSWORD_DEFAULT);'.
5. Make sure the ido-mysql and api features are enabled in Icinga 2: icinga2 feature enable ido-mysql and icinga2 feature enable api.
6. Generate Apache/nginx config. This command will print an apache config for you on stdout: icingacli setup config webserver apache. Similarly for nginx. You need to place that configuration in the right place, for example /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/icingaweb2.conf.
7. Add www-data user to icingaweb2 group if not done already (usermod -a -G icingaweb2 www-data).
8. Create the Icinga Web 2 configuration in /etc/icingaweb2. The directory can be easily created with: icingacli setup config directory. This command ensures that the directory has the appropriate ownership and permissions. If you want to create the directory manually, make sure to chown the group to icingaweb2 and set the access mode to 2770.

The structure of the configurations looks like the following:

/etc/icingaweb2/
/etc/icingaweb2/authentication.ini
/etc/icingaweb2/modules
/etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring
/etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring/config.ini
/etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring/instances.ini
/etc/icingaweb2/modules/monitoring/backends.ini
/etc/icingaweb2/roles.ini
/etc/icingaweb2/config.ini
/etc/icingaweb2/enabledModules
/etc/icingaweb2/enabledModules/monitoring
/etc/icingaweb2/enabledModules/doc
/etc/icingaweb2/resources.ini

Have a look here for the contents of the files.

Kiosk Mode Configuration

Be aware that when you create a kiosk user every person who has access to the kiosk is able to perform tasks on it. Therefore you would need to create a user in the roles.ini in /etc/icingaweb2/roles.ini.

[kioskusers]
users = "kiosk"

If you need special permissions you should add those permissions to the user via the admin account in icingaweb2 to the role of the kiosk user.

For the Dashboard system where you want to display the kiosk you can add also the following part into the icingaweb2.conf. So it starts directly into the kiosk mode. If you want to show a specific Dashboard you can enforce this onto the kiosk user via the enforceddashboard module.

<ifmodule mod_authz_core.c>
    # Apache 2.4
    SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "X.X.X.X" REMOTE_USER=kiosk
    <requireall>
        Require all granted
    </requireall>
</ifmodule>

Replace Remote_Addr with the IP where the kiosk user is accessing the Web to restrict further usage from other IPs.

Using the REMOTE_USER variable also requires adding an external backend to authentication.ini, as shown here

Customizing the Landing Page

The default landing page of dashboard can be customized using the environment variable ICINGAWEB_LANDING_PAGE.

Example on RHEL/CentOS:

vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/web.icinga.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>

  ...

  <Directory "/usr/share/icingaweb2/public">

      ...

      SetEnv ICINGAWEB_LANDING_PAGE "icingadb/services/grid?problems"

      ...

  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>