Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Icinga and Checkmk are the two open-source monitoring tools that turn up most often on the same shortlist. Both monitor IT infrastructure, and on a feature list they look close to interchangeable. In practice they are built on different assumptions, and those assumptions decide which one fits. This page works through the differences section by section: setup, customization, integrations, Windows, distributed monitoring, multi-tenancy, licensing, and cost.

Running Icinga 2 in a rootless Podman container is pretty straightforward, it works just the same as on Docker, so all the examples on our Docker Hub page work as expected. For example this one to generate certificates and initialize the master configuration: Same as with mounting some existing configuration into the container: But once you want to combine the two, for example to store the certificates on the host and mount them into the container, generating or renewing certificates will fail.

The ability to log into all corporate applications with one username and password is pretty convenient, even compared to a password manager. As a benefit, the IT department can centrally enforce one desired two-factor auth mechanism. Now we, Icinga, also provide a so-called OpenID Connect integration for single sign-on. By the end of this text you’ll know how to connect your Icinga Web instance to the ID provider of your choice.

Icinga Director’s CLI commands have supported import sources and sync rules for a long time, which includes listing, checking and running them. Before Icinga Director v1.11.6 two things you couldn’t do from the CLI, though, were narrowing a health check down to a single object, or deleting an import source or sync rule without opening the web UI. I’ll walk through both, using examples.

Guest post by Markus Opolka, Senior Consultant at NETWAYS. Originally published on the NETWAYS blog as “Icinga und Prometheus integrieren” and “Alertmanager-Icinga-Bridge – Ein Signalilo Fork”, combined and adapted for the Icinga blog with permission. Icinga and Prometheus are both great monitoring solutions, however, their focus is different. In this article, we look at how to integrate both monitoring systems and utilize the strengths of both tools.

Icinga Web 2 now ships a PasswordPolicyHook that gives administrators and module developers full control over what constitutes a valid password. Instead of hard-coding a single rule set for every deployment, the hook makes password validation an extension point: any module can register a policy, admins select the active one from the configuration UI, and Icinga Web 2 enforces it everywhere a local password is set or changed.

If you’ve copied the same icon font or the same LESS helper into two or three Icinga Web modules, you’ve hit the problem libraries exist to solve. This guide builds one from scratch: a small, self-contained icon and font pack that any number of modules can share, with no copy-pasting and no per-module registration step.

We are releasing Icinga TOTP Web v1.0.0, which adds Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) two-factor authentication to Icinga Web.

Once a year, the Icinga team goes for a team event somewhere about an hour or two away from the office. This year’s edition landed us at the Adventure Campus in Treuchtlichen, right in the middle of this year’s first heatwave. The heat was unbearable. At one point we gave up on the room we had been using and moved everyone down into a basement meeting room instead. It was quite a bit more retro in style, with an overhead projector, that we had a lot of fun with.

We are shipping a new batch of Icinga Web ecosystem releases today. Icinga Web 2.14 is the headline, bringing the baseline for two-factor authentication support, configurable password policies, a configurable Content Security Policy, and a round of developer tooling improvements that have been in the works for a while. Icinga Certificate Monitoring 1.4, Icinga Reporting 1.1, and Icinga PDF Export 0.13 join it with PHP 8.5 support across the board and a set of focused improvements for each module.