Hello, everybody.
Just a few things from my side:
There have been many exciting ideas / suggestions in the last few years, but unfortunately they often didn’t make it beyond a prototype or a demo. On the one hand this is understandable if you consider that the capacity in development is only finite but it only leads to the fact that everyone has to ask himself if this feature will ever exist or if it will remain a ghost.
Many of the features that are now implemented using PHP modules I like but I miss the distributed approach, which has always been a big advantage of Icinga. Especially things like import sources (I love them!) in the Director or the vSphere module are hard to use in production environments once you implement strong security and segmentation. I talked to Tom about this at the last OSMC and he showed me examples of what a distributed setup can look like. Without this, most new modules are worthless for many setups.
I understand that much of the Icinga universe has grown organically over the last few years, but we’re at the point where we need a solid roadmap where the role of the community is also addressed. Personally, I’ve had a lot of fun developing modules, but I don’t really feel that any value is being placed on these contributions beyond the official modules, nor is any real effort being made to involve external developers early on to ensure that after major releases everything still works as usual. This makes me tired and leads me to the next point: documentation.
The (developer) documentation for Icingaweb2 is in fact (apart from a not really maintained github repo) not available! To understand things or figure out how certain integrations are possible, I have to analyze the code every time and hope it doesn’t break with one of the future versions. There are a few people who willingly answer the majority of questions, but that can’t replace documentation! Without this documentation & communication there can’t be much input from the community.
It would be a pity if this great project with its even greater community, in which many friendships have been made, were to take the wrong path.
Nicolai