Infrastructure monitoring provider Icinga is trying to make admins lives a little easier though load reducing experiments, as well as testing and config management helpers that have landed in version 1.3 of its Windows-focused wares. 

Since the last release in late August, the collection of PowerShell modules for keeping an eye on Windows environments and tools has improved in terms of usability and now includes a way of parsing arguments into the Icinga Shell. This will prove especially useful for testing purposes, as users won’t have to redefine objects and can instead reuse them 

when switching away from their main shell for single code execution.

Testing has also become easier for cases in which Icinga commands and plugins are run with a default service or custom users, as there’s now a command for opening shells for a specific user environment. And because having lots of shells open can get quite confusing, user environment details in the form of “machine you’re on\user the shell belongs to” can be found on the top of any Icinga Shell.

To make configuring rules easier, Icinga for Windows 1.3 supports natively writing Icinga 2 `.conf` files to generate Icinga Director Baskets and includes Wmi permission management Cmdlets. The latter lets admin set permissions for specific users and Windows Management Instrumentation trees. And newly added permission documentary entries in plugins, spell out which permissions are required for them to work properly.

The Icinga team used the 1.3 release to satisfy some requests as well, so users are now, for example, able to set the server they want to use as a proxy via the new command Set-IcingaFrameworkProxyServe. They can also take the still experimental code caching feature for a spin, which is meant to reduce the load on CPU cores. 

The latter has turned out to be a problem on systems with only few cores available, so the team is currently looking into workarounds, with the cache being a first stab at a solution. Code caching can be enabled by using Enable-IcingaFrameworkCodeCache; though Write-IcingaFrameworkCodeCache is needed to make sure the cache is updated as well.

Icinga for Windows 1.3 also comes with two new plugins, which let users check the availability, state, and utilisation of Network Interfaces/Interface Teams and Storage Pools respectively. Details on those can be found in the tool’sdocumentation, which now also includes a knowledge base with deep dives into issue solutions and more.