Icinga, which started out as a fork of the open source monitoring software Nagios, is beginning to go its own way with the upcoming Icinga 2. The developers have released a technology preview of their work to date. This first release of Icinga 2 carries the version number 0.0.1. The developers will be working on the replacement for Icinga's core framework in parallel with enhancing Icinga 1.x. The developers are building the new system in C++ and moving to a heavily modularised architecture.

The developers intention is that the complete rewrite will correct some shortcomings of the current version such as the complicated configuration of the tool and scalability problems in large deployments. The preview is far from complete, as befits its preview status; according to the development plan, over the next year Icinga 2 should be receiving major features such as dynamic reconfiguration, real time event support, a legacy-compatible RPC interface to make it easier to migrate to the new release, and business process monitoring. Icinga 2 will also offer some support for Windows platforms.

The technology preview of Icinga 2 runs on Windows and Unix-like systems such as Linux; source code is available for download from Sourceforge, licensed under the GPLv2. The technology preview is only meant for testing purposes; for those who wish to install network monitoring in their organisation now, the most recent stable version is Icinga 1.8.

(fab)