Weekly Snap: InGraph, Drobo + TimeCapsule backup & Certificates

15 – 19 August gave us a peek into the new graphing addon inGraph and one of our managed services projects while explaining certificates and backup with a Drobo – TimeCapsule combo.
From the Managed Services team, Sebastian shared a little on a hosting project at search engine marketing agency crealytics. Alongside Xen Hypervisor, PostgreSQL hot standby streaming replication with load balancing, automatic failover and online recovery, the set up also boasted a MongoDB replica set and load balanced, high availability Tomcat-Apache application server with Ruby support. All safeguarded by internal and external Icinga monitoring and an external backup server, ensuring crealytics could focus on their business free from IT worries.
Lennart then took us on a safari through the certificate jungle, clarifying the differences between PEM, DER, PKCS#7 / P7B, PKCS#12 / PFX and their conversion with the help of OpenSSL. In the meantime, Birger combined his network attached storage (NAS), Drobo with TimeCapsule for accelerated backups that also work on Apple’s new Lion operating system.
Most exciting of all, Gunnar announced inGraph, our new graphing addon for the display of monitoring metrics in Icinga and Nagios systems. Designed with scalability in mind, the tool is intended to replace NagiosGrapher and NETWAYS Grapher V2. Thanks to a python based backend, inGraph can access data collected by external applications with the help of a XML-RPC interface. Via templates, monitoring data can be displayed in various combinations as seen in a preview of inGraph integrated into Icinga’s new web interface. The development team is currently ironing out features and documentation, in preparation of the release planned for the upcoming monitoring conference.