Out with Nagios, in with icinga2
Note: I’ve updated this post since I originally posted it. See my post about xFilesFactor here which describes why I updated it.
I’ve been on a bit of a journey over the last few months migrating from nagios to icinga2 for my systems, some customer stuff and the platforms at my day job after living through the love-hate that is nagios on and off for quite a few years now.

On top of the base icinga2 / icingaweb2 install I added the graphite graphing module which essentially worked out of the box give or take a couple of typos on my part . You can find all the information you need for that part of the journey on the github page for the module.
The graphite module in the context of icinga2 has three moving parts:
- Carbon-cache, which receives the information from icinga2 and writes it out to disk as efficiently as possible
- Whisper which is the database format used to store the metrics which can be thought of as a more modern and efficient version of the venerable RRD which all sysadmins since Noah’s time probably have some sort of emotional response to.
- Graphite which renders the metrics into pretty graphs into PNG format graphs.
The problem, only a day of data
A few days back I discovered that despite a my fairly uneventful installation of the graphite module on my part the graphs, despite being very pretty were only keeping a day worth of data.
Continue reading