You may have wondered in the past years (Icinga is 4+ now!) why there isn’t any book available for Icinga. There are several Nagios books around which explain the monitoring core logic pretty well – for starters, but also for experienced admins with the more advanced stuff. Still, Icinga hasn’t changed much in core regions so those books work pretty well for Icinga too.
Though, when it comes to installing Icinga, or using the Icinga Classic UI, or Icinga Web even, there are differences. While the Icinga documentation and wiki are trying their best to explain all the required parts, there’s still space left for your very own use cases and install methods, or likewise, choosing the best transport layer for your remote clients. Some may like snmp, others prefer ssh, or any client based solution (nrpe, nsclient++). Or customize Icinga Web with PNP.
Given that variety of topics, and also the idea of having Icinga with some specialities Nagios does not have, it was a really great idea to hear about an O’Reilly cookbook being prepared on that topic. Ralf and Timo approached me in late December 2012 asking about a review of their in-progress book. While i tend to review diploma thesis and other documents for friends & family not having an idea about what they are writing about, it was different here.
Basically, I had to act as reader, trying to figure out what both were trying to tell me about Icinga as well as Nagios. Which indeed isn’t that hard because I know how users feel during my active Icinga support on the various channels. Revising the chapters, getting an idea about the book, fitting it altogether. Well, and sharing some hints about stuff I know, and others don’t (like my manubulon repository with fixes applied). I love helping people actually appreciating the help 🙂
Time flies, and in the end of June plenty of reviews, edits, questions have been written within mails. I guess I spent most of time reviewing it when doing consulting at customers, in the evening when everything is boring without the bluray player or the gaming workstation 😉 Don’t ask me, how much time it was, it was worth it.
Since Icinga is sort of my “baby” I do see a great benefit for the Icinga community in having the recipes available, in German for now. Even if they do not touch the advanced topics (hey, learn to use and understand your configuration before you touch any configuration gui, or inventory mechanism!) it’s still a great book for starters. And yet, I even found topics I’ve never read about, and was motivated to use such in my environments. And still, plenty of feedback found its way into the Icinga dev tracker, or just brainstorming in how we can make Icinga better.
The book itself should be available on 28.8 according to the online stores. So thanks to Timo and Ralf, the German speaking community now got a rich ressource, where I am hoping that O’Reilly will translate it soon’ish for the international Icinga community growing fast 🙂
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