How To Install Icinga 2 on Ubuntu 18.04 / Ubuntu 16.04 & Debian 9

Icinga 2 is an open source monitoring tool. With Icinga2, you will be able to monitor your network resources, get an alert on the outage, also able to generate the performance data.

Icinga 2 is very scalable, and you can monitor small to larger, complex environments across multiple locations. Icinga 2 supports all major distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS / RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE, SLES, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and ArchLinux.

This document covers basic installation and configuration of Icinga 2 on Ubuntu 18.04 / Ubuntu 16.04 & Debian 9.

Add Icinga 2 Repository

First, switch to the root user.

$ su -

OR

$ sudo su -

Install the below package for https support.

apt-get update
apt-get install -y apt-transport-https curl

Add the Icinga public signing key to the system.

curl https://packages.icinga.com/icinga.key | apt-key add -

Add the Icinga repository using the following commands.

## Ubuntu 18.04 / Ubuntu 16.04 ###
echo "deb https://packages.icinga.com/ubuntu icinga-$(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/icinga2.list
echo "deb-src https://packages.icinga.com/ubuntu icinga-$(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/icinga2.list
## Debian 9 ###
echo "deb https://packages.icinga.com/debian icinga-$(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/icinga2.list
echo "deb-src https://packages.icinga.com/debian icinga-$(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/icinga2.list

Install Icinga 2

Update the repository cache.

apt-get update

Install Icinga 2 package.

apt-get install -y icinga2

As part of the installation, Icinga 2 service should start automatically; if not, then start the Icinga 2 service using the following command.

systemctl start icinga2

Set Icinga 2 service to start automatically on the system startup.

systemctl enable icinga2

Install Nagios Plugins

Without the plugins, Icinga 2 does not know how to monitor the external services. So install Nagios plugins on top of Icinga 2.

apt-get install -y  monitoring-plugins

Create IDO MySQL Database

The DB IDO module for Icinga 2 takes care of exporting all the configuration and status information to the database. At present, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and PostgreSQL are supported.

Here, we will use MariaDB as a database server. If you already have MariaDB server installed, you can skip the below step.

apt-get install -y mariadb-server mariadb-client

Now, install IDO modules for MySQL using the following command. You can find the icinga2-ido-mysql package in Icinga 2 repository.

apt-get install -y icinga2-ido-mysql

During the installation of IDO modules, the installer will prompt you regarding the module installation. Here is how you should answer them.

1. Select No for Enabling IDO Modules feature on Icinga 2

2. Select No on Configuring IDO modules with Icinga 2 ( We will manually setup database for IDO)

Login to MySQL.

mysql -u root -p

Create a database for Icinga 2.

CREATE DATABASE icinga2;
grant all privileges on icinga2.* to icinga2@localhost identified by 'icinga123';
quit

After creating the database, you shall import the Icinga 2 IDO schema using the following command.

mysql -u root -p icinga2 < /usr/share/icinga2-ido-mysql/schema/mysql.sql

Enable IDO MySQL Module

We would need to enable the ido-mysql in Icinga 2. Enable the ido-mysql feature using the below command.

icinga2 feature enable ido-mysql

Also, enable the command feature which helps Icinga web interface and other Icinga add-ons to send commands to Icinga 2 via the external command pipe.

icinga2 feature enable command

Configure IDO DB MySQL

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.

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

Update the above file shown like below.

user = "icinga2",
password = "icinga123",
host = "localhost",
database = "icinga2"

Restart the Icinga 2 instance to have this enabled features take effect.

systemctl restart icinga2

In our next tutorial, we will configure the Icinga 2 web interface to provide a centralized web console for monitoring servers.

That’s All