Nagios is dead! Long live Icinga!

[Gerhard Lausser]

It was bound to happen. 
Today a group of fed up members of the Nagios community announced Icinga,
"an Open Source Monitoring System, based on the well-known software Nagios".
http://www.icinga.org/
I am a user of Nagios since the days it was called Netsaint.
I saw Nagios grow and mature, installed it out of curiosity first, then to
support small admin teams and finally I did projects at enterprise level.
The latter was possible, when Nagios left the nerd niche and started to gain
attention at upper management. 
This was around 2005. The first installations of proprietary monitoring
software were being superseded by Nagios, articles were written, the first
book on Nagios came out. The community was excited and eager to see Nagios
be the number one in system monitoring. 2006 was the year of the first
Nagios conference in Nuremberg, where we all had the chance to meet Ethan
Galstad. A clever, canny person, who immediately gained the confidence of
the community. 
Then, in 2008, things slowed down. Nagios 3.x was released, which was a
great leap forward, but Ethan did not appear on the devel-mailinglist as
often as he used to. His presentation about the future of Nagios at the
annual conference was nearly the same as the year before. The NDO was still
buggy.
Neither the announced API nor the new web interface weren't even in an early
state. After the conference, volunteers set up a git repository and a
testing environment, willing to help with the considerably overdue Version
4. No reaction from the maintainer...
Instead, a blog entry "2009 - The Run of the Dark Horse" appeared on the
Nagios website. We read about "...Look to 2009 as the year in which Nagios
will rise to the top of the competition and rightfully claim its spot as
undisputed King of Monitoring..." which sounded very irritating in the face
of a stagnant development and all these OpenNMS, Zabbix, HypericHQ, Zenoss
creeping from their holes. It's not easy for a horse to win the race, when
there's no Jockey. A lively discussion started. Some thought, Ethan had an
ace up his sleeve. Insiders disabused them. Finally, in a grim sense of
humor, the Posting was renamed to "2009 - The Run of the Dead Horse".
Then, Ethan disappeared from the mailing list at all. Patches piled up, but
no one was in charge. Instead, the operators of www.nagios-portal.de
received a mail, where they were asked to not use the name "Nagios" any
more. WTF????!?!?
As I learned today, this was the moment, where concerned members of the
Nagios community formed a group, who no longer wanted to look on helplessly.
The plan was to clone the dead horse and light a fire under it's ass.
Last week there was an event in Bolzano, Italy, where Ethan spoke about
Nagios. With mingled feelings I jumped into the car and crossed the snowy
alps, expecting to hear the talk about Nagios 4 for the third year in
advance and an unrealistic hope to hear something new, I was being
optimistic. Instead I learned that Nagios 3 will be final cut for a long
time to come, with some minor bugfixes maybe. I learned about longevity,
meaning that an Open Source project can only be successful if the author
keeps up stamina all the time.
I was laughing inside. A sarcastic laugh.
So why am i writing this? I was not involved in the conspiracy, so the
german nagios community asked me to write this mail and express my feelings
from a neutral standpoint.
I phoned and wrote a lot of mails today. I don't like what happened today.
Nobody does, even Netways. But on the other side, I don't want to see Nagios
going down the drain. I don't know how things will look in a couple of
months.
If Nagios gets it's act together, excellent. If not, I'll switch to Icinga.

Gerhard Lausser

p.s. Ethan, when we met in Bozen, you greeted me in a very cordially way.
That makes it not easy for me to write this mail.


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