Date Archives → November 2018

Icinga2 graph data retention

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.

Out with nagios, in with icinga2
Icinga2 is so much nicer than nagios once set up.

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.

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Testing 123, SOTA on the lawn.

Sota pole on the lawn

SOTA pole on the lawn

Technically not really SOTA, because that would require a summit, but testing an Antenna I built for the purpose at least 18 months ago.

SOTA, Summits on the air is a slightly crazy pursuit within the larger sphere of amateur radio involving lugging radio gear, including batteries and antennas, up a mountain or random hillock to try and talk to other similarly afflicted amateur radio tragics around the country and around the world.

I made this antenna so long ago now I couldn’t rightly remember if it worked so before I venture out into the wild blue yonder over summer to try and scale the heights with a backpack of assorted technology I thought I should check it was working.

So there I am, lying on the lawn with the trusty FT857 and a LiPO battery from one of my model aircraft plugged into the back.

The dog is wondering what on earth I’m doing as he’s normally the one lying on the lawn on a sunny Saturday afternoon and he’s certainly not sure about the wire and string creation I’ve pegged up near the trampoline.

Packed antenna.

Rolled up linked dipole with hand mic for scale.

A quick test with the analyzer puts the resonant point on 40m at a shade under 7.100 Mhz and 14.150 Mhz for 20m which are the key bands for SOTA here in ZL-Land although there’s taps for 15 and 10m as well.

Those upper bands are a little tricky at the current low-point of the solar cycle so not a priority and I was meant to be mowing the lawn, not lying down on it so I plugged in the rig and spun the dial.

There was a contest on somewhere well north of us as R0ML and a couple of other Russians were calling CQ in consummate contesting fashion although whispering with 25W into a low dipole was probably a bit of a stretch from my end although I did shout breathlessly at the microphone for a few minutes.

Then along comes Steve, ZL1PWR calling CQ on 14.215.  At about 1,100km north up in the land of the Auck somewhere it was enough proof for me that the antenna is good and there’s always something a bit pixie-dust about portable HF operation even if it’s just on the front lawn.

After a bit of a rag chew I packed up and mowed the lawn leaving the dog content that order was restored in the shade under the trampoline.