Icinga Quickstart
Prev | Chapter 2. Getting Started | Next

## Icinga Quickstart

Introduction

This guide is intended to provide you with simple instructions on how to install Icinga from source (code) and have it monitoring your local machine within 20 minutes.

No advanced installation options are discussed here - just the basics that will work for 95% of users who want to get started.

This guide will give you examples for currently three different Linux distributions: Fedora, Ubuntu and openSUSE. Similar distributions may work as well. That should include RedHat, CentOS, Debian and SLES.

Other distributions may inherit from these examples.

If you are planning to use a database with IDOUtils please read the section called “Icinga with IDOUtils Quickstart” instead!

What You'll End Up With

If you follow these instructions, here's what you'll end up with:

- Icinga and the plugins will be installed underneath /usr/local/icinga

- Icinga will be configured to monitor a few aspects of your local system (CPU load, disk usage, etc.)

- The Icinga web interface will be accessible at http://localhost/icinga/ or http://yourdomain.com/icinga

Prerequisites

During portions of the installation you'll need to have root access to your machine.

Make sure you've installed the following packages on your system before continuing:

- Apache

- GCC compiler

- C/C++ development libraries

- GD development libraries

You can install these packages by running the following commands (as root or sudo):

Fedora

    yum install httpd gcc glibc glibc-common gd gd-devel

Ubuntu

    apt-get install apache2 build-essential libgd2-xpm-dev

OpenSUSE

Please use yast to install the packages

1) Create Account Information

Become the root user.

    su -l

Create a new icinga user account and give it a password:

    /usr/sbin/useradd -m icinga
    passwd icinga

On some distributions you'll need to add the group in a single step:

    /usr/sbin/groupadd icinga

2) Download Icinga and the Plugins

Change to your local source directory i.e. /usr/src

    cd /usr/src

Either fetch the actual icinga-core snapshot from Icinga GIT

    git clone git://git.icinga.org/icinga-core.git

Icinga Website

Don't forget to download the

Nagios Plugins

3) Compile and Install Icinga

Extract the Icinga source code tarball (or change directory to the GIT snapshot)

    cd /usr/src/
    tar xvzf icinga-0.8.tar.gz
    cd icinga

Run the Icinga configure script. You will get help by using the --help flag:

    ./configure

Compile the Icinga source code. To see available options, only use "make".

    make all

Install binaries, init script, sample config files and set permissions on the external command directory.

    make install
    make install-init
    make install-config
    make install-commandmode

or shorter

    make fullinstall

Don't start Icinga yet - there's still more that needs to be done...

4) Customize Configuration

Sample configuration files have been installed by using

    make install-config

into /usr/local/icinga/etc/. You'll need to make just one change before you proceed...

Edit the /usr/local/icinga/etc/objects/contacts.cfg config file with your favourite editor and change the email address associated with the icingaadmin contact definition to the address you'd like to use for receiving alerts.

    vi /usr/local/icinga/etc/objects/contacts.cfg

5) Configure the Web Interface

Install the Icinga web config file in the Apache conf.d directory.

    make install-webconf

Create an icingaadmin account for logging into the Icinga web interface. If you want to change it later, use the same command. Remember the password you assign to this account - you'll need it later.

    htpasswd -c /usr/local/icinga/etc/htpasswd.users icingaadmin

If you want to change it later or want to add another user, use the following command:

    htpasswd /usr/local/icinga/etc/htpasswd.users <USERNAME>

Reload/Restart Apache to make the new settings take effect.

Fedora

    service httpd restart

Ubuntu / OpenSuSE

    /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

6) Compile and Install the Nagios Plugins

Extract the Nagios plugins source code tarball.

    cd /usr/src
    tar xvzf nagios-plugins-1.4.13.tar.gz
    cd nagios-plugins-1.4.13

Compile and install the plugins by changing install directory to /usr/local/icinga

    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/icinga --with-nagios-user=icinga
    make
    make install

7) Start Icinga

Add Icinga to the list of system services and have it automatically start when the system boots (make sure you have installed the init script before).

Fedora / OpenSUSE

    chkconfig --add icinga
    chkconfig icinga on

Ubuntu

    ln -s /etc/init.d/icinga /etc/rcS.d/S99icinga

Verify the sample Icinga configuration files.

    /usr/local/icinga/bin/icinga -v /usr/local/icinga/etc/icinga.cfg

If there are no errors, start Icinga.

Fedora / OpenSUSE

    service icinga start

Ubuntu

    /etc/init.d/icinga start

8) Login to the Web Interface

You should now be able to access the Icinga web interface at the URL below. You'll be prompted for the username ( icingaadmin) and password you specified earlier.

    http://localhost/icinga/

or

    http://yourdomain.com/icinga/

Click on the "Service Detail" navbar link to see details of what's being monitored on your local machine. It will take a few minutes for Icinga to check all the services associated with your machine.

9) Other Modifications

Make sure your system's firewall rules are configured to allow access to the web server if you want to access the Icinga interface remotely.

    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Setting up your mail transfer agent (MTA) like exim, sendmail or postfix to allow Icinga sending notification emails won't be explained here.

Please refer to the Nagios Wiki for more ressources.

10) You're Done

Congratulations! You sucessfully installed Icinga. Your journey into monitoring has just begun.

You'll no doubt want to monitor more than just your local machine, so check out the official Nagios Documentation for more configurations...

Prev | Up | Next
Quickstart Installation Guides | Home | Icinga with IDOUtils Quickstart

© 2009 Icinga Development Team, http://www.icinga.org