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Icinga

Creating a Business Process and adding it to Dashboard

In this blogpost I will introduce, how to create a business process from monitored hosts and services and how to add them to dashboards. Business Process module is an interesting module in Icinga Web 2. It allows you to visualise and monitor hierarchical business processes based on any or all objects monitored by Icinga. We can create custom business process and trigger notifications at process or sub-process level.

Debugging Filters and Apply Rules using the Script Debugger

Have you ever been in a situation where something in your Icinga configuration did not work as expected and you ended up doing small changes and reloading Icinga over and over again? This can be especially tricky with apply rules and filters if they don’t match the objects you hope for. This post will show you how you can use the Icinga Script Debugger in this situation to get an interactive console in the context where the apply rule or filter is evaluated.

It's all about the tools, is it?

User Interface design or product design in general is less about tools than it is to have a proper understanding about the product you work on. And besides understanding, how the user is going to use your product, recognizing patterns and underlying relationships between key elements is crucial. Besides that, there are some tools, that really enable me to iterate quickly on ideas and concepts and then communicate these to the team.

Web Access Control Redefined

One of the focuses of version 2.9 of Icinga Web 2 will be on access control. For years on now, Icinga Web 2 had a very simple role based access control (RBAC) implementation. This suited most of our users fine. However, there were still some requests to enhance this further. The next major update of Icinga Web 2 (Version 2.9) and Icinga DB Web will allow users to configure exactly this.

Revoke certificate of an Icinga endpoint

A Certificate Revocation List (CRL) is a list of certificates that have been revoked by the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) before their scheduled expiration date. Those certificates should no longer be trusted. A client application such as an Icinga Agent can use a CRL to verify that the certificate of the server is valid and trusted.

Using the Icinga Web API

Unfortunately, there is little to no documentation for using the Icinga Web API to perform monitoring actions such as scheduling downtimes. But it’s a simple thing and I’ll give you a quick example of how to do it. Using the Icinga Web API instead of the Icinga API gives you the advantages of the permission and restriction system, various authentication methods and auditing.

Using Thola for monitoring your network devices

Once upon a time there was a small company in the south west of Germany that used an old check plugin for monitoring its network devices. But as their network got bigger and bigger over time, the plugin (written in Perl) became more greedy than ever before and swallowed all of the available resources. The CPUs were melting and the RAM was about to collapse. So a small team of creative software developers decided to take the fate of their company into their own hands.

Icinga for Windows: Management Console Preview (Experimental Feature)

Today we are very excited to share with you our new experimental feature for Icinga for Windows: The Management Console Our goal with this feature is to make the entire configuration and management of the Icinga Agent as well as the installation, distribution and automation as easy as possible - for all Icinga for Windows components. Let us know what you think about this feature!