Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ever wondered how Icinga 2 manages all those variables, and how it knows which one to use? In this blog post, we will explore all the different variable scopes in Icinga 2, and by the end, you will know what this mysterious error message means when you see it in your logs.

Today’s IT environments are rarely confined to a single data center or a single cloud provider. Enterprises are embracing a mix of cloud platforms, virtual machines, and on-premises hardware to stay agile and competitive. This blended environment is known as hybrid IT infrastructure, and managing it effectively is key to keeping systems healthy, secure, and performing at their best.

This is a guest blogpost by Markus Opolka from the Icinga Enterprise Partner NETWAYS. After forking the Grafana Module for Icinga Web last year, we started thinking about alternative ways to display Icinga performance data graphically in the web interface. Running a separate Grafana instance just to render graphs is a lot of overhead and adds operational complexity — no matter how much you like Grafana. Plus, installing the grafana-image-renderer isn’t always straightforward.

After NETWAYS has already taken a leading role in the past in maintaining the Ansible Collection Icinga, contributing features and bug fixes, it’s now official: The Ansible Collection Icinga is moving into the NETWAYS namespace (on GitHub and Ansible Galaxy). The people involved in the repository will remain largely the same.

We’re excited to share that Icinga for Kubernetes v0.3.0 is here! This release is packed with features designed to make monitoring your Kubernetes environments smoother, smarter, and more efficient. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

In the dynamic world of IT operations, a common misconception has emerged: Observability vs Monitoring is often framed as a battle where one replaces the other. At Icinga, where open-source monitoring is our expertise, we aim to clarify this misunderstanding. Observability doesn’t supplant monitoring—it complements and enhances it. The term “Observability” has become a buzzword in the tech industry, often touted as the modern solution to outdated, static monitoring practices.

In recent months, the IT monitoring landscape has seen notable investment activity: These developments are part of a larger trend, with investment firms showing growing interest in the IT monitoring sector. Although such activity isn’t unusual in the tech industry, the current intensity and frequency indicate that IT monitoring is emerging as a key area for growth-oriented strategies.

Designing user interfaces for Icinga Web is always a bit of a balancing act. Once we’ve worked through all the technical and conceptual details of a new feature, it can be tough to step back and see things from a fresh user’s point of view. We as developers know too much — and that makes it hard to guess how others will understand what we’ve built.

This is a guest blogpost by Adam Sweet from the Icinga Partner Transitiv Technologies. Since this is a longer post, we added a tl;dr at the end. For many, host and application monitoring is an afterthought at the end of a project. Some people don’t think about monitoring at all until a few failures go unnoticed and a customer or end-user calls to ask why something isn’t working.

Modern applications are often built using microservices: Small, independent components that work together. This makes systems more flexible and scalable, but also harder to monitor. In this guide, we’ll explain what microservice monitoring is, why it’s different from traditional approaches, and how to do it effectively. Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving an existing setup, this article will help you monitor microservices with confidence.