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Robin O'Brien Follow

Feb 19, 2018 · 4 min read · Listen

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Icinga 2: Installation (Part 1)

Welcome to Part 1 of my experience in installing and setting up Icinga 2 for distributed
monitoring. Part 2 is available here, and Part 3 is available here.

You build it, you run it.

— Werner Vogels
Prior to having Icinga 2 we struggled to clearly see what was happening within our
product’s deployment. We were building the product but we were not running it correctly
as we were unaware of downtimes. Enter Icinga 2.

We have been running Icinga 2 for a good 6 months now. We started with Icinga 2 and
Icinga Web 2. We slowly added InfluxDB and Grafana. The added transparency over our
entire infrastructure has been astounding. We have been able to react much faster to
downtime incidents as well as use the historic data stored in InfluxDB and visualised in
Grafana to analyse trends and identify potential downtime incidents (full disks, AMQP
error queue sizes etc.)

I am writing this guide while attempting to migrate our Icinga 2 instance into AWS EC2.
The reason for the move is an unreliable internet connection in our datacenter in Pretoria,
South Africa. Downtime and/or high latency on the fibre connection creates false
warnings and critical notices for all the infrastructure located in all our datacenters
around the world (Johannesburg South Africa, Atlanta US, Frankfurt Germany etc). I plan
to capture and share all the steps I go through while creating a new instance, configuring
it to match our current setup as well as a post on migrating from an existing instance. I
ll l d f b d
will include information about setting up AQMP monitoring and using Icinga in its Top
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Down Config Sync approach.
Before we jump right into the installation guide I just want to highlight how great the
Icinga 2 documentation is. If, at any point, you are not sure about what I have written
please consult the official documentation. I am no expert on the topic but I am glad to
assist where I can.

So lets get started.

The server
As mentioned above, we are moving from a self-hosted instance to an instance deployed
inside AWS EC2. The server I have created is as follows, but please feel free to choose what
ever instance will suit your purposes better.

Centos 7

t2.Medium

8 GB storage — SSD

40 GB storage — Magnetic

Please ensure you have the correct Security Group assigned and you have a Key Pair used
that allows you to gain access to the OS. For now we will just need port 22 open so we can
begin the setup. It is a good idea to ensure this port is only accessible to you. This can be
done by adjusting the Security Group used. More information on security groups is
available here.

From here on the assumption will be made that your instance is a RHEL based system,
specifically CentOS and that you are able to SSH onto the box.

First up, as will all fresh operating systems I setup we will just ensure all packages are up-
to-date.

$ yum update

$ reboot
Icinga 2 and the EPEL yum repositories
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The EPEL repository contains the dependencies for Icinga 2. Icinga 2 itself also makes use
of a yum repository for package distribution. We can now add both the EPEL yum repo
and the Icinga 2 yum repo.

$ yum install epel-release

$ yum install https://packages.icinga.com/epel/icinga-rpm-release-7-

latest.noarch.rpm

Installation
We are now ready to do the actual package installation. Since we have added the correct
Yum repositories, we are able to use Yum to do the installation. This has the added benefit
of being able to just run ‘yum update’ in the future do install the latest versions.

$ yum install icinga2

$ systemctl enable icinga2

$ systemctl start icinga2

We have now successfully installed Icinga 2 and made sure that it will start when ever the
OS restarts.

Additional plugins (optional)

Before we conclude part 1 of this series I want to mention the Nagios Plugins. We use
them extensively for our checks and they have proven to be very useful. This is an optional
step however, I believe it is one thats worth completing. You can read more about the
plugins on the GitHub Page.

$ yum install nagios-plugins-all

Extra notes
Just as some extra information, Icinga 2 on Centos 7 makes use of systemd. This means we
can interact with Icinga 2 using the standard systemd approach. For example:
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$ systemctl start icinga2

$ systemctl stop icinga2

$ systemctl status icinga2

Final thoughts
This concludes part one of the guide. I know its been very brief but it covers all one needs
to know to get started with a fresh installation of Icinga 2. Subsequent posts will highlight
how to setup your new Icinga 2 instance as well as install and configure the Web UI for
Icinga 2. The guides will cover the database setups and user creation etc. I hope to
complete those guides as soon as possible. Thanks for reading and I hope you have learnt
something new or at least have a feel for how simple the Icinga 2 install is.

Part 2 is available here.

Part 3 is available here.

References
The best reference is the Icinga 2 officail documentation. It can be found here:

https://www.icinga.com/docs/icinga2/latest/doc/02-getting-started/

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