I’m the community manager of Icinga (you’ve probably seen me around here), and I’m thinking about working on a generalized onboarding guide for new users of Icinga Web.
Before I dive in, I’d really love to hear how you do it.
Whether you’re onboarding teammates, handing it off to other departments, or just showing someone the ropes, what’s your approach?
What’s the very first thing you show people in Icinga Web?
What parts are the most essential to know?
What parts confuse people the most?
Do you have internal docs, cheat sheets, or just sit down and screen-share?
Would you mind sharing some of your docs with me?
I’d love to collect a few real-world practices and turn them into something that’s useful for everyone
Any stories, tips, or rants are welcome. Thanks in advance!
We think you should be able to demonstrate Icinga with an up-to-date installation and real-world checks being performed as well as IcingaWeb2 modules like an active BPM module. When it comes to onboarding, for us the focus is more on principles than details. We use https://icinga-demo.linuxfabrik.ch for this purpose. For more details some sort of training is needed.
Depends on who receives the intro and what their role is.
Internal:
If they are “just” a user, they get about a one hour intro into using the web interface.
If they also should do some configuration in the Director, like creating a scheduled downtime or modifying a threshold, I’ll add another ~hour or so.
Customers: usually want to be their own admin, so they get a more in depth introduction, usually four to eight hours.
The different views, like current problems, host and service detail pages, histories.
How to set downtimes/acknowledgements. Checking the history.
Not quadrouple-clicking “check now” if the have the permissions.
Check- and Retry-Interval, scheduling vs. check source, hard state, soft state and notifications
Initial introduction is done in person or via screen share.
For further questions there are some small HowTo’s in our wiki plus the “monitoring experts” are always available for questions.
I could, but just looked into it, and it still features screenshot from the “old” IDO webinterface
Thanks everyone for your replies!
Gave me a bunch to think about - I’ll be looking into a short video that explains it in a way that is similar to a screenshare and look around in our demo environment
@log1c Haha, time to update the docs, eh? If you want to share them anyway - you have my contact details
If anyone else wants to add to this, I’d be happy to hear it!
First thing to do is adding the new user to the AD group, so he can see our icinga instance.
What’s the very first thing you show people in Icinga Web?
The main dashboard, how to get details of failed services (we use a lot of self written plugins for our services)
What parts are the most essential to know?
how to get more details (check plugin output, graphs from graphite)
difference between acknowledge and downtime
What parts confuse people the most?
hard and soft state, when are notifications send (but thats both more icinga than icingaweb…)
Do you have internal docs, cheat sheets, or just sit down and screen-share?
We have got something in our internal wiki and had a screen sharing session with our department, which was recorded for reference. But the most stuff is done face to face, the video is still showing the old monitoring plugin, not icingadb.
Would you mind sharing some of your docs with me?
Shure. I do not think it’s very useful for general public, because we are monitoring a special infrastructure with mostly our own plugins, but shure. But it’s all in German language.
