To be able to observe current state of hosts and services I use separate display with Raspberry Pi connected to it. I’d say it’s the cheapest solution to have monitoring displayed on the screen, TV or projector.

For that I’ve chosen Raspbian distro. So first we need to install Raspbian to Raspberry Pi (how to do that you can read here).

After prepared SD card, boot your Raspberry Pi, hold shift when it shows a message and install Raspbian (Feel free to choose another distro if that’s more suitable for you, however I choose raspbian because it’s lightweight and just works).

After install you’ll be rebooted into raspbian with rasp-config started. Be sure to enable there:

• Change user password if needed (default one is ‘raspberry’)
• Enable boot to Desktop – “Desktop Log in as user ‘pi’ at the graphical desktop”
• In the internationalization change timezone, locale and keyboard layout if needed
• In advanced options enable:
  • Overscan if you see black bars around picture (however this didn’t help me on my old SyncMaster 710n)
  • Change Hostname if needed
  • Memory split – I’ve set 128Mb for GPU, in previous setup (my SD card broke so I had to reinstall) I’ve used default 64Mb, but after setting this to 128Mb it looks like browser works faster.
  • SSH – enable it. You don’t need to keep keyboard/mouse connected all the time
• Finish and reboot

• Setup x11vnc to connect and control GUI:

• Setup web browser. Most fastest and reliable browser I found on the net is ‘minimal-web-browser’ (https://code.google.com/p/minimal-web-browser/)

•  Add script to desktop to start browser with URL you want (didn’t have time to autostart it)

•  After login just start the browser and click third icon in menu to have icinga reloaded automatically