Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As some of you might have already noticed, we recently gave our official Icinga 2 container image builds a complete overhaul. These new images are currently available only as snapshot builds but will replace the existing stable images with the next Icinga 2 v2.16.0 release. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the key changes and improvements that come with the new images, as well as the reasons behind these changes.

When your Linux system feels sluggish, one of the first things to investigate is the CPU usage. The CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the brain of your machine, and if it’s overloaded, everything else slows down. In this guide, you’ll learn different ways to Linux check CPU usage with command-line tools, how to interpret the metrics, and why automatic monitoring with Icinga ensures long-term system stability.

Why wait for the next poll? An SNMP trap is a real-time alert sent from a device to a monitoring system, without waiting for polling. Ever had a router die silently at 3 AM while your monitoring system was still polling away every 5 minutes? Yeah… not fun. That’s where SNMP traps step in. Think of them as the push notifications of network monitoring: instant, lightweight, and sometimes misunderstood.

Modern IT environments are hybrid, distributed, and constantly growing. To keep them reliable, organizations rely on monitoring that scales, automates, and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows. We collected 24 Icinga customer stories from industries including finance, telecom, manufacturing, and public services. What unites them is the choice of Icinga as a flexible and cost-efficient alternative to proprietary monitoring tools.

Recently I was importing an Icinga configuration for testing purposes. Working with this configuration, I found that there were icon images assigned to the objects. Sadly, those didn’t display, because I didn’t have the icon set installed. So I thought of creating my own.

Today, we are going to take a look at the Icinga 2 API and the various ways targets can be specified for different actions, such as querying information or scheduling downtimes. This post focuses on the API request payloads themselves and assumes some familiarity with sending requests to the Icinga 2 API. Please refer to our documentation for the missing details if you want to try the requests yourself. In general, specifying the objects to which an action applies works the same way for all actions.

Obviously nobody is disagreeing with this. It’s just that during ongoing development and while focusing on features and bug-fixes, testing often falls behind in priority, especially when developers would need to write tests for existing or legacy code, teams can be hesitant to invest the time. C++ applications have to run a diverse set up target environments, varying in OS, compilers, C/C++ standard libraries and dependency versions.

The Icinga Director configuration tool makes it easy to define monitoring objects through the web UI and deploy them to the Icinga 2 API. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to configure services in Icinga Director. If you haven’t used Icinga Director yet, take a look at our introduction. I assume that most of you are already familiar with Icinga 2 and have used the DSL to define objects.

Icinga DB Web Automation allows you to automate monitoring tasks and integrate them directly into your systems and workflows. It is possible to issue command actions without a browser. To do so, a form needs to be submitted by a tool such as cUrl. Every request you send follows the same permission rules and access restrictions defined in the web interface, so security and user roles still apply. Want to target specific hosts or services? Simply add filter parameters to the URL.

Monitoring with Icinga primarily focuses on servers and infrastructure. But there are also the people operating these systems from their workstations and laptops. If a server can be accessed from a machine with an outdated operating system, the patch level of the server becomes irrelevant.