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.

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.

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.

A Certificate Revocation List (CRL) is a list of certificates that have been revoked by the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) before their scheduled expiration date.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.

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.

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.

Not a long time ago, we released Icinga for Windows v1.3.1, fixing plenty of reported issues from our amazing community and user bases. Today however, we want to talk about the next big release for Icinga for Windows and are excited to tell you more about all the new features!

There are multiple ways to interact programatically with Icinga. Last week Henrik demonstrated how to connect to the Icinga 2 API through the Icinga 2 Console. Working with the Icinga 2 API is probably the most obvious way to interact with Icinga. Still, I would like to suggest to you another option: How you can fetch data from Icinga Web.

Today I will show you a couple of small functions you can use with the Icinga Console. Using the Icinga Console can help with scripting in general and provides a quick and easy-to-use way of extracting information from your Icinga environment. We will take a look at extracting information belonging to the service objects in Icinga. Obviously, you can pinpoint different objects, like host objects, with which you can work via the Icinga 2 API and Console.

In this blogpost, I explain how to create dashlets using custom filters. This way you can create dashlets of your own which you find is necessary. Having dashboards in fact improves monitoring. Dashlets are the different sections under the given dashboard, which are the snapshots of some monitoring views and are defined by a name. Requirements: Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 installed.