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Monitoring and Observability at Scale

Angelika from Icinga3 min read
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SUMMARY

Hi John,

this month we're looking ahead to a webinar on the resources it takes to run monitoring and observability at scale. Icinga Director 1.12.0 also lands, with full dictionary support for custom variables. On the blog, we cover two practical guides: connecting Icinga Web to your identity provider via SSO, and fixing a common Podman permission issue.

Happy Reading!

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Kris Buytaert and Blerim Sheqa look past the metrics-vs-traces debate to the operational side: deployment effort, config ownership, and the engineering hours each approach costs - and how that changes between 50 hosts and 5,000.

Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Time: 3 PM - 4 PM CET // Convert your local time

RELEASE OVERVIEW

Icinga Director v1.12.0: dictionaries and a real fix for restores

Icinga Director 1.12.0 gives custom variables full support for dictionaries, replacing the old Data Fields model - apply-for rules can now iterate over dictionaries directly, using $key$ and $value$. A CLI command migrates existing Data Fields for you. The release also fixes a long-standing bug where restoring a deleted user group failed to bring back its members, and now requires PHP 8.2+. See the full release notes before upgrading.

BLOG

Icinga Web SSO walkthrough

Icinga now ships an OpenID Connect integration for Icinga Web, letting you log in through your existing identity provider instead of a separate password. The walkthrough covers setup, using GitLab as an example.

Running Icinga 2 in a rootless Podman container

Mounting existing configuration into a rootless Podman container fails with a permission error, due to how Podman maps user IDs. This guide explains why, and covers three ways to fix it.

COMMUNITY CORNER

If you connect Icinga Web to a ticket system via GenericTTS, note that maintenance has moved from the Icinga GitHub organization to Linuxfabrik, known for their Monitoring Plugins Collection. Update your remotes to the new repository.

We are a Gold Sponsor of OSMC 2026 - and this year the conference celebrates its 20th anniversary. Three days, more than 30 talks, three workshops, and the hallway conversations that make it worth attending. Still need a ticket? Use code ICINGA20@OSMC_2026 for 20% off at osmc.de/tickets.

THIS MONTH IN THE FORUM

Reload crash traced to a race condition

A production cluster with 10K hosts kept crashing on config reload with a "Bad file descriptor" error. After weeks of digging, the cause turned out to be a race condition in HTTP connection handling, already addressed in an open pull request.

New commands missing from Director

A custom CheckCommand worked fine on the master but never showed up in Director's UI. Turns out external commands only sync when you run Director's Kickstart Wizard - four clicks, several hours saved.

Should resources.ini support encrypted passwords?

A recurring question: why can the webserver user read plaintext credentials in resources.ini? The thread digs into why encryption alone wouldn't close that gap - if you have thoughts on this, the discussion is still open.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Yonas (Developer)

What was on your plate this month?
“First, I dug into ServiceNow - the docs, the APIs, and how to integrate it with Icinga Notifications. It was overwhelming at first, but I got a decent, if still limited, grasp of building a seamless integration.

The last couple of days, I've been building a feature in Icinga DB that correlates notification histories with Icinga 2 events. It took a lot of iteration - including patching Icinga 2 itself - but I finally got it working, and I'm happy with the result.”

NEED ANYTHING ELSE?

Questions about deployment, scaling, or support options? Talk to someone who actually develops the tool.

You made it to the end of this newsletter!

If you have any questions, feedback or anything you would like us to cover in the next newsletter, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Until next month,
Angelika and the Icinga Team

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