Icinga is an open source systems management system that was created in 2009 as a fork of the open source IT infrastructure monitoring solution Nagios and is distributed in Germany by NETWAYS from Nuremberg. The amasol IT infrastructure experts have worked intensively with Icinga in various customer projects.
The results are numerous optimizations and extensions of the Icinga plugins available in the public repositories. The goal is to improve the monitoring quality. The amasol extensions identify and partially fix bugs and problems the standard plugin versions, that are not noticeable at in typical use cases, but come up regularly in edge cases in complex customer environments. Furthermore, amasol developed own plugins.
At amasol, we specialize in providing comprehensive support and solutions for companies utilizing Icinga, an open-source monitoring and alerting system. With our extensive experience and expertise in Icinga, we have successfully collaborated with numerous clients to enhance their monitoring capabilities, streamline their operations, and ensure optimal performance. This document serves to showcase our achievements, competencies, and the potential value we can bring to your organization.
Custom Plugin Development: Tailored Monitoring Solutions
We understand that every business has unique requirements when it comes to monitoring their IT Infrastructure. Our team of skilled experts has a proven track record in custom plugin development for Icinga based on own framework for bash-based plugins. By tailoring monitoring solutions to your specific needs, we can provide you with accurate and relevant data, enabling proactive identification and resolution of issues. Custom plugins empower your organization to monitor any aspect of your infrastructure, ensuring maximum visibility and control.
Challenge: The out-of-the-box Icinga plugins did not fulfill specific monitoring requirements.
Solution: Leveraging our expertise, we designed and developed a range of custom plugins tailored to various environments, including Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and SunOS. Each plugin was enriched with relevant system and meta information, ensuring comprehensive monitoring.
Outcome: Our custom plugins expanded the monitoring capabilities of Icinga, providing organizations with valuable insights and enabling proactive management of critical systems. Notable examples include the SAP plugin (over 4000 lines), a config-based filesystem monitoring plugin, and a Pacemaker cluster monitoring solution.
Enriched Event Management: Enhancing Incident Response Efficiency
Efficient event management is crucial for minimizing downtime and improving incident response. At amasol, we excel in enriching events within Icinga. By integrating additional contextual information, we enhance the understanding of events and their potential impact on your operations. This allows for better prioritization, quicker incident triage, and more effective decision-making, leading to improved overall incident management processes.
Challenge: The default configuration of Icinga generated alerts with fixed strings as alarm titles, limiting the effectiveness of incident management.
Solution: Recognizing the potential for optimization, we devised a solution to include actual measured values in the alarm titles, providing a more informative incident summary. Additionally, we developed a flexible switch within Icinga services to enable customized title display.
Outcome: With our enhancements, each alert now carries a helpful and precise alarm title, enabling more efficient incident management. For instance, a new alarm title might read: "Filesystem utilization too high! 81% on /xy." instead of "Filesystem /xy is running full".
Automating Tasks: Unlocking Operational Efficiency
Manual and repetitive tasks can consume valuable resources and introduce human error. Our team specializes in automating tasks within Icinga, enabling you to streamline your operations and focus on strategic initiatives. By automation, we can help you reduce response times, increase efficiency, and achieve consistent monitoring and management processes. From automated alert notifications to routine maintenance tasks, we have the expertise to create customized solutions tailored to your organization's needs.
Challenge: Icinga agents occasionally experienced hanging issues, leading to interruptions in monitoring.
Solution: Our team developed a robust script that identifies and automatically restarts such agents, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
Outcome: By implementing this automation, we significantly increased the uptime of Icinga agents, ensuring uninterrupted monitoring and saving valuable time.
Icinga Director: Simplifying Configuration Management
We possess in-depth knowledge and expertise in utilizing the Icinga Director, a powerful configuration and deployment tool for Icinga. Our team can harness the capabilities of the Icinga Director to simplify the management of your monitoring infrastructure. We can assist in designing, implementing, and maintaining your monitoring environment, ensuring that it is highly scalable, flexible, and aligned with your specific requirements. With our guidance, you can efficiently manage hosts, services, and notifications, enabling you to focus on proactive monitoring and ensuring the health of your IT systems.
With Icinga Director, we can offer the following benefits:
Effortless Configuration Management
Icinga Director provides a user-friendly web interface that allows administrators to define and manage their monitoring configurations intuitively. It offers a graphical representation of the monitoring setup, enabling easy configuration of hosts, services, and associated attributes. By utilizing Icinga Director, we streamline the process of managing complex monitoring setups and reduce the potential for errors.
Templating and Automation
One of the key advantages of Icinga Director is its powerful templating capabilities. We can create reusable templates for hosts, services, and notification settings, significantly reducing the time and effort required to configure monitoring for new components. This automation ensures consistency across your infrastructure and simplifies the management of large-scale monitoring environments.
Version Control and Auditing
Icinga Director includes version control functionality, allowing for tracking and reviewing changes made to the monitoring configuration. This feature ensures transparency and facilitates the auditing process, making it easier to identify any modifications, roll back to previous configurations if necessary, and maintain an accurate history of configuration changes.
Integration with External Data Sources
Icinga Director supports integration with external data sources such as databases, APIs, and LDAP directories. This capability enables us to dynamically populate host and service configurations based on data retrieved from external systems. By integrating with your existing infrastructure, we can create a seamless monitoring experience and reduce the manual effort required to maintain configurations.
Integration with Event Management Tools: Streamlining Incident Management
To further enhance your incident management processes, we specialize in integrating Icinga with event management tools. By leveraging the power of industry-leading event management solutions, we enable seamless information exchange between Icinga and your incident management platform. This integration enriches events with additional context, consolidates alerts, and provides a holistic view of your IT infrastructure's health. By centralizing incident data and automating incident creation, you can streamline your response processes, reduce mean time to resolution, and improve overall service availability.
Performance Optimization: Maximizing Efficiency
We optimize Icinga performance by analyzing the monitoring setup and implementing strategies such as fine-tuning check intervals, optimizing notification settings, and intelligent event suppression. Our approach significantly reduces system load, improves response times, and eliminates unnecessary notifications, ensuring a more efficient and streamlined monitoring environment.
Conclusion:
At amasol, we have a proven track record of delivering exceptional support and solutions for Icinga. Through our expertise in custom plugin development, enriched event management, task automation, Icinga Director utilization, and integration with event management tools, we can provide you with a comprehensive monitoring solution tailored to your unique needs. Our documented achievements and competencies serve as a testament to the value we bring to our clients and the potential we can unlock for your organization. Partner with us to optimize your monitoring capabilities, enhance incident management processes, and drive the success of your business.
Contact us today to discover how we can tailor our expertise to suit your unique requirements and propel your monitoring capabilities to new heights.