Talk by Thomas Gelf about the new Icinga2 configuration editor named Icinga Director. Given at Icinga Camp Berlin 2016

1. www.icinga.org
Icinga Director
IcingaCamp Berlin – 01/03/15

2. Thomas Gelf
Web 2 Product owner
Module prototyping machine
Principal Consultant @netways

3. Talk structure
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4. AGENDA

5. What is this?
Why should I use it?
Where can I get it?

6. What is this?
A powerful config tool for Icinga 2
Why should I use it?
Where can I get it?

7. What is this?
A powerful config tool for Icinga 2
Why should I use it?
It is fancy, fast and sexy!
Where can I get it?

8. What is this?
A powerful config tool for Icinga 2
Why should I use it?
It is fancy, fast and sexy!
Where can I get it?
https://github.com/Icinga/

9. Sexy?

11. HISTORY

13. A little bit of history
Kickof meeting April 17th, 2016
Initial commit: two days later

14. Getting started

15. Installation
provide a database
tell Director...
...and he cares about the rest

16. Using Puppet?
Idempotency out of the box :-)
Try `--help` or the documentation for more information
Same for Kickstart!

17. Let's try it out!

18. CONFIGURATION MADE EASY

19. Director target audience
fully automated environments
point & click users
at the very same time (!!)

20. Show me the click thingy!

21. AUTOMATION FIRST

22. Import & Sync
• Distinct operations in Icinga Director
• Bomb it with your data
• Do not really care about sync details

23. Icinga loves automation
• Director is a perfect fit for Puppet
• Collecting resources with Puppet is slow
• Faster: sync from PDB
• Exporting resources?
• Use Director as your collector!

27. IS IT APIFIED?

28. Director offers a REST API
• Simple and powerful
• Easy and intuitive to use
• Assists you with the trickiest part of the
job: detect and handle changes

37. Monitoring has to „just work“
• No one wants to waste time on it
• But not every system is fully automated
• e.g. „Add a new MSSQL instance“
• Environmental sensors

38. Deploying every few minutes?
• Don't want to wait for next Puppet run?
• New hosts or apps need to be actively
monitored seconds after being deployed

39. ARCHITECTURE

40. Architecture
• How and where to attach
• How does it talk to my Icinga nodes
• Masters, Satellites, Agents?

41. Protocol
• Uses the Icinga 2 API (TLS, REST)
• Ships whole config, not single objects
• This is ways faster with lots of objects
• Could still ship partial changes

42. Communication Paths
• Director talks to your master node(s)
• Deploys always to the very same node
• Knows agents / satellites
• Controls them via config distribution

43. Demo

44. HOW CAN YOU USE DIRECTOR?

45. Lots of datasources?
Director is your single source of truth
CMDB has a lot of infomation...
...but not everything
...and somewhat outdated
Use it nonetheless
Enrich it with other sources

46. Using Satellites?
• Use templates with defined Zone
• Config flows top-bottom
• Commands and templates are usually
still deployed to the global zone
• You can override those decisions on any
object at any time

47. Running Icinga 2 Agent?
Do not care about Zones and Endpoints
They are autocreated
Provided certificate signing tickets
Generated customized icinga2.conf

48. EXTEND IT!

49. Director is highly modular
Current Hooks:
DataType, ImportSource,
PropertyModifier, ShipConfigFiles
Even Directors own implementations extend and use them to
provide you nice real-world examples

50. Demo

51. USE IT!

52. Code
https://www.github.com/Icinga
→ icingaweb2-module-director
https://www.github.com/Thomas-Gelf
→ icingaweb2-module-puppetdb
→ icingaweb2-module-fileshipper

53. Thank You!
www.icinga.org
dev.icinga.org
git.icinga.org
@icinga
/icinga
+icinga

54. QUESTIONS?
Thomas Gelf
<thomas.gelf@netways.de>