System health overview

One of the new features is the System health overview. A cron job is monitoring all important background processes and system metrics. As soon as an issue is detected, System health overview will change its state into warning or critical depending on the possible impact of the issue.

Performance improvement

To avoid complete page reloads, we refactored high-traffic pages like the host and service overviews with AngularJS. Due to the new frontend framework, filter requests or pagination are completely handled by an API request instead of an complete page reload.

Also, the MySQL database is a common bottleneck. With the new version, we added a Redis in-memory database that will cache heavy operations like calculating user permissions.

Enhanced filters

To be able to add more filter options, we developed a completely new filter component and added it to the most visited pages. With every new version, the new filter will be added to more pages.

In the Log entries overview it is now possible to filter by one or more hosts. This makes debugging easier in case of an error, for example if you want to track why a notification was suppressed.

Design Module

Is openITCOCKPIT theme too light or too dark? We adjusted the Design Module and the inbuilt themes, so it's easier to create your own style.

You now also have the option to add your logo to the top menu bar.

How to Update

In one of our previous articles we described how to update an installation of openITCOCKPIT in detail. If you are already familiar with our update process, you can update to the new version in three easy steps:

tmux
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

Update process

Database Upgrades

From time to time we need to do some long running database updates. For this reason you should always run the update from a screen or tmux session.

While the database update is in progress, your monitoring is still available and schedules checks.

Long running database updates will always print a status information, like in the following example: Convert table nagios_logentries from int to bigint(20) unsigned. This could take awhile...

All database changes will be applied full automatically - no manual action is required.

Backup your current nagios.cfg

All openITCOCKPIT configuration files, are located in the directory /etc/openitcockpit. If you have modified one of the configuration files manually, apt will offer you the following options:

1. 1) Install the package maintainer's version
2. 2) Keep the local version currently installed
3. 3) Show the differences between the versions
4. 4) Other options...

Most of the time you will see this notice for the file /etc/openitcockpit/nagios.cfg. This will happen, if we update the Nagios or Naemon Core to a new version.

To avoid any issues, you should always use the nagios.cfg we ship with our packages (Option 1). Experienced users can also merge the files together.

To reapply your manual changes, after the update is done, you should create a backup of the file /etc/openitcockpit/nagios.cfg first. Example:

cp /etc/openitcockpit/nagios.cfg /root/nagios.cfg_upgrade

Run the update

tmux
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Yes, that's all .

Update in a nutshell

Happy new year, your openITCOCKPIT Team!

Check which repository you are using

As already mentioned, usually openITCOCKPIT will update automatically to the new repository.

Via the Interface

Browse to Administration Package Manager. If you are still on the old repository, you will see the following warning:

Via the CLI

Make sure that the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openitcockpit.list contains our new repository https://packages.openitcockpit.com.

How to update to our new repository

Import the repository key:

apt-key adv --recv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com 1148DA8E

Add the new repository to your sources.list. In this example for Ubuntu Xenial:

echo 'deb https://packages.openitcockpit.com/repositories/xenial xenial main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openitcockpit.list
apt-get update

You can find all supported distributions in our download section or on our GitHub Repository.