$USER@bit-of-a-byte ~ $ cat /var/log/icinga2-tutorial-part-0-network-monitoring-for-the-masses.log

Icinga2 Tutorial: Part 0 - Network Monitoring for the Masses

10 Aug 2015

EDIT (2018/12/09): These guides haven’t been updated since 2015. It is possible that there are dead links, or that the configuration syntax has changed dramatically. These posts are also some of the most popular on my blog. I plan to do a new guide eventually, but for right now please take the following entries with a grain of salt.

Introduction ## {: #icinga2-part-0-introduction }

This will be a bit more informal than most of my posts as this is more of a hobby project than anything with really standardized applications. I’ve been exploring the network protocols available to me on my EdgeRouter now for the past year, and last night I sat down and taught myself SNMP. After three hours and poking around the MIBs, I realized that I absolutely hate SNMP. That being said, I very much like the idea of it. I have to use a CLI and a GUI on the same device most of the time to watch all the stats I like to watch, and I immensely dislike putting that kind of rendering work on my EdgeRouter, because I can assure you, the poor thing is taxed enough.

So I started exploring multi-protocol management systems today. Clearly, Spiceworks is one of the best programs you can get. However, it is Windows only. Here on Linux, I really only have NAGIOS, or so I thought.

Enter Icinga2

Icinga2 is a very interesting program to me in the same way that Maxthon was a very interesting browser. Both Maxthon 2 and Icinga 1 were built on top of existing applications (Internet Explorer and NAGIOS, respectively) with the intent of expanding their functionality. I know a good many people who would insist that NAGIOS has all the functionality you could ever need, and I would agree, except for one thing. If I want ease of configuration, I have to pay $2000USD for my small home network. I don’t have that kind of money, and if I did, you can bet your ass it would go to getting me embedded development boards or external controllers for debugging and programming. Anyways, then Maxthon 3 came out, and it stepped away from the Trident engine, and went with Google’s WebKit. Just like Maxthon, Icinga2 has stepped away from NAGIOS and has become its own solution, but still remains compatibility with NAGIOS monitoring plugins.

Purpose of These Posts

At first this was just going to be something fun for me to do. However, I have noticed a somewhat disturbing lack of end to end documentation for Icinga. Yes, all the information is there in the manuals, but it is still nice to see how someone sets it up from end to end. This series of posts is going to show how to do just that, starting with how to install Icinga, which will go up in the next post.

Some Things to Consider

This is my first time using Icinga2. You will be learning right along with me. Which means some posts may spend a lot of time going back and working on things that should have already been done. Besides that, I am not using an Icinga dedicated machine, which means I am running a desktop release, Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 to be exact. I like 2. It is a good number. Also the distribution is really nice, and DOESN’T have systemd, but that’s a post for another day.

Additionally, my deployment is rather small. All told I will be monitoring about 10 devices at most across four or five protocols, a fairly standard home network. I will keep adding updates the more I learn about it, or if I add more services. However, you may need to do some extra research to tweak things for your deployment.

I do plan to branch off into Netflow at some point. So you can expect that in the future.

Related Posts