Installing Icinga2.13.6 under Devuan Chimaera

Work in progress 2023-01-16

These notes relate to setting up Icinga 2.13.6 (current as of 2023-01-15) and replace the previous notes I wrote in 2017 or earlier.

They are based on the official and pretty awful Icinga2 documentation at:

Some of the reasons I describe that documentation as "pretty awful" are:

  1. Assuming you can manage to follow the instructions for getting Icinga2 set up and presumably working, there is no obvious link to the entirely separate documentation for setting up Icingaweb2, without which Icinga2 itself is essentially useless
  2. The instructions for setting up a Master, Master + Agent, or Master + Satellite + Agent get horribly confused (and confusing) by mixing in the High-Availability concepts of two masters in one zone, or two Satellites in one zone, which (in my opinion) nobody should be doing on their first attempt at getting Icinga2 installed and working
  3. There is no clear example of which files and directories need to be set up under /etc/icinga2/zones.d on a Master / Satellite / Agent system, when this is crucial for a distributed monitoring system to work
  4. Every distribution's instructions for setting up icingadb assume that your machine is running systemd. There is no information at all on where, for example, you are supposed to get a copy of /etc/icingadb-redis/icingadb-redis.conf from, without which the icingadb redis server refuses to start
  5. Assuming you do manage to find the instructions for setting up Icingaweb2, plenty of essential things are left out - you're not told that you need to install "php", for example (which is not obvious if you see that "php7.4" is already installed), or php-xml / php-pdo-mysql; you're not told that you need to restart Apache after you have installed these things, and there is no guidance at all for using the web-based setup wizard
  6. It's quite likely that if you follow all the instructions and make your best guesses at what you're supposed to select, you get a web page telling you that "Currently there is no dashlet available. This might change once you enabled some of the available modules." Nothing tells you which modules you might need to enable in order to get anything which looks like the configuration documentation.
    • I eventually tried searching for extra packages with "icingaweb2" in the name, and found "icingaweb2-module-monitoring", which is the magical thing the documentation does not tell you needs to be installed in order for Icingaweb2 to do anything useful at all

So, with that in mind, here is a genuine step-by-step guide to installing Icinga 2.13.6 under Devuan Chimaera, and ending up with a working system.

  1. Basic installation of Icinga2 and the essential monitoring plugins (do this on every machine whether it's a Master, a Satellite or an Agent).
  2. Installation of the Icinga database and Icingaweb2 on a Master (and perhaps on a Satellite too if you wish).
    • At this stage, you should have a working Icinga2 setup with an Icingaweb2 front-end which you can log into and see one monitored host (the machine itself) being monitored for 12 services.
    • You can then move on to creating one or more Satellites (optional, dependent on your network setup), and the Agent machines which are what you're really aiming to be monitoring.
  3. Connecting the Master and the Satellite/s

Upgrading: Icinga2 supports the each machine being one major version higher than its subordinates, so for example you can have Master 2.14 connected to Satellites 2.13 connected to Agents 2.12.

This means that during any upgrade process, starting with all machines running the same version, you should upgrade the Master first and work your way down the hierarchy from there.

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