Nagios is dead! Long live Icinga!

[Haydn solomon]

Gerhard Lausser wrote:
> 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 software were being superseded by Nagios, articles were written, the first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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>   
I've been using nagios since netsaint days and must say that I've always
wondered why more committers weren't added as the project grew. I think
that handing
out more responsibility rather than Ethan being only committer will be
better for
nagios in the long run. Ethan can still have the final say into what
goes in but he
will have to trust his committers.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The NEW KODAK i700 Series Scanners deliver under ANY circumstances! Your
production scanning environment may not be a perfect world - but thanks to
Kodak, there's a perfect scanner to get the job done! With the NEW KODAK i700
Series Scanner you'll get full speed at 300 dpi even with all image 
processing features enabled. http://p.sf.net/sfu/kodak-com