In the scenario where you want to execute tasks repeatedly at a specific time and have full control over when they are executed and how the results are handled, it makes sense to build this into your application instead of setting up a cron job, for example. I’d like to give you a quick example of how you can achieve this in PHP using two great libraries, ReactPHP and cron-expression. ReactPHP is an event-driven programming library that has an event loop at its core.

A few years ago, we introduced a new, completely independent library. The IPL – Icinga PHP Library, a bundle of Icinga PHP libraries. Since then we are actively working on further development and adding new features. Today I would like to highlight individual parts of this library and the tasks they perform.

Like I’ve mentioned in my last blog post, we use GitLab pipelines for packaging. We have a lot of software, like Icinga, Icingaweb and its various modules, which we want to build across multiple different operating systems. This results in a huge number of jobs and pipelines, doing very similar stuff. We have a lot of code repetition, and this is bad – code repetition means higher code maintenance , and it invites bugs.

One of Icinga’s greatest strengths is its ability to integrate with other systems and use those systems’ data to enrich monitoring. It can write time-series data to InfluxDB, Graphite or even Prometheus with our icinga2-exporter. It can talk to different data sources so that hosts and services can be created and managed automatically. This means that lots of manual work is eliminated.