After the post on Nagios, as a dutiful blogger, I was searching on what is new in Open-source server monitoring systems. Thats when I stumbled upon Icinga.

Icinga is an enterprise grade monitoring system, which forked off from the good-‘ol Nagios. It was known that they are working their brains out on developing something. Curiosity made me dig deeper.

Icinga- the meaning of the word in Zulu being “it looks for”, monitors the server on a more effective and efficient manner. It maps the entire network and dependencies between devices so that one can view the overall status and find out the root cause of the issue.

Icinga credibly boasts to extrapolate long term developments such as capacity utilization and hence help you predict and prevent future obstacles.

Since Icinga works more or less like an “extension” of Nagios, we will have complete backward compatibility, along with a whole new set of features. So, all the Nagios configurations, plug-ins and add-ons can be used with Icinga too.

Though Icinga retains all the existing features of its predecessor, it builds on them to add many long awaited patches and features requested by the Nagios user community.

What will change for Nagios users?

Through Icinga, significantly more people can participate in the development of the software. The Icinga project is open to the participation of more users. Community suggestions or patches will be introduced faster, to ensure the ongoing improvement of Icinga.

The first release was made on 28 October 2009. Just 5 days left for the next release( March 1st 2010), I wonder what all wonders are waiting to be revealed.

NB: 5 hours back, I was browsing on the net about Nagios and Icinga, when a pop-up came out from my gmail. It said, Icinga is now following you on twitter. Guess they really know how to keep watch.