Icinga 2 meets InfluxDB

When it comes to monitoring we like to send out a notification as soon as the problem occurs. What’s better than a system that reports a problem the very moment it appears, right? However, we are aware that alerting alone is not always enough. To identify the problem’s root cause it is often necessary to have more information about a service besides its availability state. To meet this claim, most of the monitoring plugins used with Icinga 2 can return performance data. Additionally, the output contains a string showing one or more performance data metrics, for example the time a host or service check took to execute, the number of bytes being transferred, or the free disk space. With the new InfluxDBWriter feature of Icinga 2.5 it’s possible to automatically store this data in an InfluxDB database – without detour. In order to achieve that, the corresponding Icinga 2 object communicates with the native InfluxDB HTTP API.

I really should replace the old RRD perfdata files with InfluxDB. Grafana is a really nice tool.