Moved to Icinga

I just installed Icinga, it was the right decision!

First of all respect to the Icinga guys, the compatibility to Nagios is great! Moving from Nagios to Icinga is mainly copy and paste. Syntax is the same, management structure also equals, you can even use all your previous installed Nagios plugins and the nagios-checker add on. Well done! Except for the web interface (looks much more professional) every feels like Nagios. So I can’t see any reason to stay with Nagios.

Here are some things I had to do:

• First of all I changed the credentials for the web interface:

  /etc/icinga % mv htpasswd.users htpasswd.users-org
  /etc/icinga % htpasswd -c -s htpasswd.users NewUser
  

• This new user needs also authorizations, so you need to edit /etc/icinga/cgi.cfg and replace icingaadmin with NewUser .
• The rights in /var/lib/icinga/rw/ were wrong, www-data wasn’t able to access the directory. So I wasn’t able to schedule manual checks via web. When I changed the permissions everything was fine:

  /etc/icinga % l /var/lib/icinga/rw/
  total 8.0K
  drwx------ 2 nagios www-data 4.0K Apr 18 01:02 .
  drwxr-xr-x 4 nagios nagios   4.0K Apr 18 01:02 ..
  prw-rw---- 1 nagios nagios      0 Apr 18 01:02 icinga.cmd
  /etc/icinga % chmod 750 /var/lib/icinga/rw/
  

• I added the following into the DirectoryMatch directive of /etc/icinga/apache2.conf , to force me to use SSL encryption:

  SSLOptions +StrictRequire
  SSLRequireSSL
  

• I shortened the mail subject of the notifications. By default the subject looks like:

  ** PROBLEM Service Alert: localhost/Aptitude-Updates is WARNING **
  

But I’m just interested in the important parts, so I changed the following in /etc/icinga/commands.cfg :

  [...] /usr/bin/mail -s "** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Service Alert: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$ **" [...]
  

to:

  [...] /usr/bin/mail -s "** $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$ **" [...]
  

the the notifications now come with a subject like this:

  ** localhost/Aptitude-Updates is WARNING **
  

All in all I’m glad that I gave Icinga this chance and recommend to test it if you are still using Nagios. Maybe I’ll test some further Icinga features and maybe we’ll migrate at the university..