The team behind monitoring platform Icinga has released version 1.0 of the Windows version of its project, offering a production-ready way to monitor hosts running the Microsoft OS. 

Icinga started off as a fork of the Nagios project, with the aim of overcoming development bottlenecks and ensuring the improvement and progress of the open source monitoring tool. Almost eleven years later, the project now also provides a Windows flavour, which comes in the shape of a PowerShell Framework and plugins.

In the blog post announcing the release, Icinga dev Christian Stein positions the project as a way to improve Windows system integration. “By using default system components for fetching information, we ensure a wide compatibility with every supported Windows system, not having to worry about certain updates or installing third party applications.”

While the framework part provides “a general toolset to fetch and compute collected information”, the plugins implement the functions necessary to get them and contain “the core handling for telling the Framework how to compute the data”. The two are separated to make sure plugin updates don’t bring about the need for a full-blown framework upgrade.

Users are free to write their own check plugins, but can also use the ones provided by Icinga. More should become available over time, as the team plans to look into topics such as Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and Hyper-V.

To help those interested in the new project set up monitoring, the Framework comes with over 200 Cmdlets to get going. In order to make it all work, Windows 7 / 2008 R2 or higher, and PowerShell 4.x or newer need to be installed. A guide to setup the system can be found in the project’s docs.