Icinga Version 1.7 Released

Online, May 16, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Icinga, open source monitoring solution and Nagios fork has released version 1.7 for download. While improving performance in the core and simplifying packaging, the release gives users more flexibility in customizing Icinga's two user interfaces.

Coming in line with packaging conventions, Icinga has shifted libraries and added configuration parameters to make Icinga easier to package for various distributions. The changes are significant and affect all admins, who will need to update their configurations according to the release notes when upgrading.

Concerned about the inconvenience it would cause users and the team's developers, Core Developer Michael Friedrich weighed up the benefits: "We knew such changes could break a lot and create all sorts of headaches for us - but we thought, in the end it will be worth it for the packagers, who continue to support us by making Icinga convenient to install for many users."

Also in the core, event looping has been minimized during check rescheduling to reduce CPU load and optimize performance. This has been bolstered by improvements to IDOUtils' handling of large objects in Oracle. Of particular note, a long neglected bug in the Icinga/Nagios core has also been resolved, so that flexible downtimes now last the duration specified once triggered. In the Classic UI, users can also view when the downtime was triggered and the period of time it was in effect.

Above all, version 1.7 gives users a view into their configurations behind the web interface that they use. In the Classic UI, this has included two new windows - 'CGI Config Options' which allows admins to see users authorizations in the front end, and 'Modified Attributes' which juxtaposes host and service configurations against the latest attributes applied in the GUI.

With v1.7, Icinga Web also offers similar configuration visibility. Through a new global master configuration cronk, administrators can view and search through all configurations in one place. "These new features make the relationship between configurations in the back-end and user interactions in the web front-end much more transparent, in both interfaces. Instead of having to dig through configuration files, users can see exactly what is going on a few clicks away," added Marius Hein, Icinga Web Developer.

This extra visibility is complemented by new customization options in the two user interfaces. In the Classic UI they include the ability to determine the detail of information displayed in the log view and status map - whether it be a maximum number of logs in the former or specified hosts and host groups in the latter.

In Icinga Web, user-assembled custom cronks are now even more convenient to create, with "Save" and "Save As" functions. These allow users to adjust filters as they require and save various cronk views as they go.

Indeed, the process of customizing views for Icinga Web has been enhanced at a more fundamental level. Thanks to the integration of Doctrine Query Language (DQL) views developed by the Icinga Web team, advanced users and addon developers can design their own cronk modules to collect and display data from external databases and systems.

Finally, in the continued development of two separate interfaces, many calculations have now been standardized. From check execution time and problem duration to pending states and performance details, results in Icinga Web v1.7 now reflect those in the Classic UI, answering a request from the user community.

Icinga 1.7 comes just days after the open source project turned 3 years old and hit the 100,000th download mark. Enthusiastic about Icinga's future, Icinga Co-founder and Reporting Developer Michael Lubben noted: "Three years on, we release v1.7 to an ever growing community of users and contributors. Their continued feedback, suggestions and support give us motivation keep improving open source monitoring."

For more information, the Icinga project is found at: www.icinga.org

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- NOTES TO THE EDITOR -
Icinga 1.7 Change Log

Configuration Changes for Upgrade
• Moved bindir/idomod.o to libdir/idomod.so
• Moved /var/icinga to /var/spool/icinga in icinga.spec (upgrade safe)
• Renamed icinga-idoutils rpm to icinga-idoutils-libdbi-mysql|pgsql in icinga.spec
• Enable-libtap is deprecated, make test now works out-of-the-box with rewritten tests

Core
• Avoid insane looping through event list when rescheduling checks (Mathias Kettner, Andreas Ericsson) #2182
• Added a lot of configure params to allow easier packaging (refer to complete change log)
• Introduce lib/ for modules with new .so extension
• Added nebmodule version/name check for idomod (this allows future version dependencies) #2569
• Added trigger_time to downtimes to allow calculating of flexible downtimes end time #2537
• Fix scheduled_downtime_depth falsely incremented if in flexible downtime with duration < end-starttime window #2536

Classic UI
• Added option for max log entries displayed in showlog.cgi #2145
• Added status map resizing with exclude/include button (thanks to Mat) #2186
• Added Javascript to refresh page/pause easier #2119
• Added display_status_totals as cgi.cfg option in order to allow the status totals to be shown again #2443
• Added readonly cgi.cfg view into the config section #1776
• Added is_in_effect and trigger_time to downtime view for html, csv, json #2538
• Added modified attributes view and reset cmd #2473 #2474
• Fixed status totals are wrong when searching #1524
• Fixed reset forms on return after submitting command #2117

IDOUtils
• Changed varchar(255) to text in mysql (not cs and address rfc columns) #2181
• Set module info in idomod, to be checked on neb module load in future versions #2569
• Change standard string escaping for postgresql queries to use the E'foo' notation #1974
• Fixed lob handling in Oracle #2303,#2342
• Fixed OCI-21500 when freeing lobs #2509
• Fixed pgsql unix_timestamp cannot handle timstamp with timezone #2203

Web
• Control custom cronk creation #2456 (Database upgrade required to 1.7)
• Enabled modify cronk by component #2457
• Added DQL-Views as backend for templates ( #2178 #2426 #2459 #2368 #2056 )
• Overwriting of default cronks are now possible, standalone configuration only module#2494
• New Cronk which shows agavi/icinga-web configuration only for appkit_admins #2494
• Icinga-web release version in database, select * from nsm_db_version #2096;
• Added check for XSL before running #2564
• Clear cache script configurable #2383
• Stripped down library overhead for installation
• Random password generation of auth provider #2578


For more details and the full change log see:


Icinga Wiki
Core Change Log: https://wiki.icinga.org/display/Dev/Icinga+Core+Changelog
Web Change Log: https://wiki.icinga.org/display/Dev/Icinga+Web+Changelog 


Icinga Project Roadmap
https://dev.icinga.org/projects/icinga-development/roadmap