2.1. Advice for beginners
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## 2.1. Advice for beginners

Thanks for choosing Icinga! Icinga is quite powerful and flexible and although you can see the first results in less than 30 minutes, this is just the beginning of your journey into system monitoring. Configuring it to your needs can take a lot of work depending on the number of things to be monitored and the complexity of your environment. Once you become familiar with how it works and what it can do for you, you'll never want to be without it. :-) Here are some important things to keep in mind for first-time Icinga users:

1. Relax - it's going to take some time. Don't expect to be able to get things working exactly the way you want them right off the bat. It's not that easy. Setting up Icinga can involve a bit of work - partly because of the options that Icinga offers, partly because you need to know what to monitor on your network (and how best to do it).

2. Meanwhile you will find packages for the most important distributions. Please consider using one of them instead of installing from source. It will save you some time. Please keep in mind that the paths differ from the ones mentioned in this documentation. For information on packages please take a look here.

3. If you don't find a package or don't want to use if for whatever reason then please use the quickstart instructions. The quickstart installation guide is designed to get most new users up and running with a basic Icinga setup fairly quickly. Within 20 minutes you can have Icinga installed and monitoring your local system. Once that's complete, you can move on to learning how to configure Icinga to do more.

4. Read the documentation. Icinga can be tricky to configure when you've got a good grasp of what's going on, and nearly impossible if you don't. Make sure you read the documentation (particularly the sections on "Configuring Icinga" and "The Basics"). It is important to know how plugins work. Take a look at the monitoring overview as well. Save the advanced topics for when you've got a good understanding of the basics.

5. Seek the help of others. If you've read the documentation, reviewed the sample config files, and are still having problems, send an email message describing your problems to the icinga-users mailing list. If you've done some background reading and you provide a good problem description, odds are that someone will give you some pointers on getting things working properly. "good description" means to include details on your operating system, the version of Icinga, as well as what you tried and the results of it (preferably copy&paste). More information on subscribing to the mailing lists or searching the list archives can be found at http://www.icinga.org/community/. Another source of information is the how to wiki section.

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