Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Clusters get retired. A test cluster is torn down, a workload moves to a new environment, a provider contract ends. Icinga for Kubernetes does not know about any of that. Since v0.3.0, several clusters can write into one shared database, and Icinga for Kubernetes Web shows them side by side. But stopping or uninstalling the daemon for a cluster leaves all of its data in place.

What happens when you treat the service grid like a screen. Every now and then a side project starts as one thing and quietly turns into something much sillier. Mine started as a way to get more comfortable with the Icinga 2 configuration. It ended with a question nobody asked: can the service grid in Icinga Web play GIFs? Spoiler: kind of. And on the way, I learned a lot about how Icinga 2, Icinga DB and Icinga Web work together.

Monitoring as code means defining hosts, checks, thresholds and notification rules in version-controlled files, and deploying them through review and automated validation, the same way infrastructure as code handles servers and networks. With Icinga you can do this with plain configuration files in Git, the Ansible collection maintained by NETWAYS, the Puppet modules maintained by Vox Pupuli, the Icinga Director, or the REST API from tools such as Terraform.

An Icinga Web filter is a chain of conditions, each one a column, an operator, and a value, combined with & and |. You type it into the search bar of Icinga DB Web, but the same syntax shows up in URLs, dashboards, role restrictions, and the event rules of Icinga Notifications Web. This post covers the whole thing: operators, wildcards, grouping, and filtering all the way down into arrays and dictionaries.

When I first tried Claude Design, shortly after it was released, I wasn’t impressed. As an every day Figma user, I missed the option to manipulate elements directly, especially for fine tuning details. What I overlooked at that point was the fact that it is really good at generating different options efficiently. Most of them aren’t usable, but getting these options suggested helps when exploring and combining different approaches and ideas.