The world out there is neither perfect nor uniform, and that’s good as it is. You’re using VMware, but also running KVM. A little bit of AWS is a must, and something has been deployed to Azure. Evaluation projects for Mesos/Marathon and Kubernetes are on the run, some of them already running in production. A lot of information is in your Active Directory, but some departments are only half-way in. A lot of orphaned entries are to be found. Some use Puppet, experiments with other tools are going on, and quite some things are still under manual control. There are three CMDBs, but none of those are complete. There is an Excel sheet for IP address reservations. Oh, and by the way, network people are of course using their very own tool-chain.

In such kinds of environments, Icinga Director is in full force. Given concrete implementations from daily practice, this presentation shows how to build a fully automated monitoring system based on varying data sources. Optionally, you can have different degrees of automation to accommodate varying speeds within individual teams.

This shouldn’t be an introduction to Director. Given dedicated solutions for specific problems in real projects, the possibilities of this software will be shown.