Day job: IT consultant at a municipality in Norway
My main responsibilities include monitoring everything (with Icinga!), device management through Novell ZENworks Configuration Management and VMware infrastructure.
Which part of Icinga could you put your name on?
The Classic UI’s multi-selection dropdown menu and the final Icinga releases generally. I test all parts of each release in different configurations to see what breaks along the development cycle.
What are you currently working on?
1. Testing a possible fix for core locking when used with IDOUtils (database output used by Icinga Web, Icinga Reporting, etc), for faster reloading and restarting on configuration changes.
2. Reading the code in both CGI’s and Core to understand the general flow of it, so future ideas and concepts can be tested easier. Might even be a new feature to the Classic UI in the future, though I can’t promise anything yet.
3. General testing, including demo VM’s with Icinga preinstalled so one can test it within a virtualized environment.
What attracted you to Icinga?
The community approach to contributions in the code and support that’s handled in a professional manner for free in IRC, mailing lists and on different forums, ranging from someone’s first attempt at a configuration change to someone submitting a fix or enhancement for the CGI’s.
What do you enjoy about working on the project?
That others are using code I’ve contributed to, knowing it makes a difference for the better in their daily operations.
What was one memorable moment while working on Icinga?
Halting the 1.2 release by saying was a major bug in Icinga Core, clearing retention.dat and status.dat. The real issue was that the disk itself was full on my test VM. Michael Friedrich (release manager of that release) was not happy about that one 😉
Outside of Icinga, what are some of your other pet projects?
NoMa, a web frontend + daemon designed to make it easier to filter notifications based on a set of rules, combined with date + time ruling and a set of methods to better deliver notifications, for easier overall notification management. The configs can be quite messy when it integrates several different groups of staff in one console with a lot of contacts and special needs (vacations and holidays to name a few!). Using NoMa to administer notifications (or better, delegating it to them, letting them set the rules themselves) saves many hours a week of adjusting configuration of notifications to make everyone happier.
What would you bet to be the next big thing in the open source or IT world?
From a sysadmin perspective: The ubertool, One Tool to rule them all, One Tool to find them, One Tool to bring them all and in the spirit bind them.
No, actually I am not really sure what’s next, it can be anything which makes working with both Icinga and IT in general even more interesting!
How do you like to spend your time away from the keyboard and monitor?
Friends, exercise, fantasy books (reading “A Game of Thrones” at the moment, going to do the whole series).
What’s your two cents on Icinga?
Do it properly and do it once. (On configuration, revisiting messy configuration is something I don’t want anyone to endure, take the extra time when first writing to make sure it’s readable at first glance, add comments if unsure.)
