Category: Web Hosting

Icinga 2 is an open source network monitoring system which checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. Its Scalable and extensible, Icinga2 can monitor large, complex environments across multiple locations.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation Icinga network monitoring on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Icinga 2 Features:

Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ping, etc.)
Monitoring of host resources (CPU load, disk usage, etc.)
Monitoring of server components (switches, routers, temperature and humidity sensors, etc.)
Simple plug-in design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks,
Parallelized service checks.
Ability to define network host hierarchy using “parent” hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable.
Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution.
Notification of contact persons when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method).
Escalation of alerts to other users or communication channels.
Two optional user interfaces (Icinga Classic UI and Icinga Web) for visualization of host and service status, network maps, reports, logs, etc.
Icinga Reporting module based on open source Jasper Reports for both Icinga Classic and Icinga Web user interfaces
Capacity utilization reporting.
Performance graphing via add-ons such as PNP4Nagios, NagiosGrapher and InGraph.

Install Icinga 2 on Ubuntu 16.04

Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 <code>php7.0-mcrypt
</code>

Step 3. Installing Icinga 2.

First, enable the add-repository feature and add the repository for Icinga with the below commands:

apt install software-properties-common
add-apt-repository ppa:formorer/icinga

Install Icinga 2 package:

apt update
apt install icinga2

Once the installation is complete. Make sure the service is up and running fine:

systemctl status icinga2.service
systemctl enable icinga2.service
systemctl start icinga2.service

By default, Icinga2 enables the following features. But we can confirm the enabled settings by running this command as below:

icinga2 feature list

Step 3. Installing Icinga2 plugin.

Icinga2 will collect the service information based on the monitoring plugins. So, we need to install nagios plugin using below command:

apt install nagios-plugins

Next, you need to install the IDO module which is crucial for the Icinga 2 web interface. It will export all configuration and status information into its database. Execute the following command:

apt install icinga2-ido-mysql

Then restart Icinga 2 for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart icinga2.service

Once you enabled the IDO modules, Icinga 2 places the new configuration file at /etc/icinga2/features-enabled/ido-mysql.conf in which we need to update the database credentials manually:

cat /etc/icinga2/features-enabled/ido-mysql.conf

Update the above file shown like below:

root@:wpcademy.com~# nano /etc/icinga2/features-enabled/ido-mysql.conf
/**
* The db_ido_mysql library implements IDO functionality
* for MySQL.
*/
library "db_ido_mysql"
object IdoMysqlConnection "ido-mysql" {
user = "icinga2",
password = "icinga123",
host = "localhost",
database = "icinga2"
}

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Icinga 2.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. You should read and below each steps carefully which will set root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB.

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Icinga 2. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Icinga 2 installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database icinga2;
MariaDB [(none)]> grant all privileges on icingaweb.* to icinga2@localhost identified by 'icinga123';
MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Step 5. Installing Icinga 2 Web.

After creating the database, we can install the Web interface plugin and configure it one by one:

apt-get install icingaweb2

Step 6. Accessing Icinga 2.

Icinga2 will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/icingaweb2/setup or http://server-ip/icingaweb2/setup and complete the required the steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed Icinga 2. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Icinga 2 network monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Icinga 2 web site.