Nagios forked by Icinga, GroundWork’s POV

Since the recent announcement of the Icinga fork of the Nagios project, a number of customers, community members, analysts, and journalists have asked what this means for GroundWork.

As most of you are probably aware, Nagios is an important component of GroundWork Monitor, and one of the many valuable pieces of open source software used in various manners across the GroundWork Monitor product family, along with GroundWork’s own code.

First and foremost: GroundWork has no intention of taking sides in whatever feud(s) might exist between Nagios and Icinga.

GroundWork has a history of working with multiple open source projects (such as RRDtool, Cacti, Ganglia, BIRT, and many others). Whatever developments might be forthcoming from the Icinga team shouldn’t conflict with that philosophy and, in fact, may lead to new avenues of cooperation and sponsorship. In the area of Nagios plugins, in particular, there may be much mutual common interest.

Some other questions that have been asked:

If I decide to use Icinga, will I be able to then migrate to GroundWork, as I currently can with Nagios?

The short answer: Until Icinga is released, we won’t really know for sure.

The slightly-less-short answer: If Icinga achieves its stated goal of being completely compatible with Nagios, it has a decent chance of working in one fashion or another. What we don’t know yet is if the process would be the same as migrating from vanilla Nagios, or would require some extra steps.

Will GroundWork be including some or all of the Icinga project into the GroundWork Monitor family?

At this juncture, it’s way too early for us to know or say.

If there is something in the Icinga project you’d also like to see in GroundWork Monitor, let us know.

If there are other questions we didn’t answer, feel free to ping us, either in the comments below, on Twitter @davidpdennis or email ddennis at gwos dot com.

Thanks,

David