Author Archive for Mike Guthrie

Nagios XI 2012r1.4 Improvements

With each new version of Nagios XI, we do our best to include the most important bug fixes, improvements, and features that we can accomplish in a few weeks time. The upcoming Nagios XI 2012r1.4 is going to be a notable release of XI for both performance improvements and internationalization.

Internationalization

For our international users, we’ve been hard at work to update XI appropriately for internationalization, as well as kick-starting multiple translations using Google translate. We’ve been working to balance code updates with community contributions for languages, and this upcoming release will ship with a default.pot file that can be used to update user’s PO files that they may have begun populating. This release of XI will ship with kick-started translations in the following languages.

  • German
  • Spanish
  • French
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Korean
  • Chinese

Performance Improvements in 1.4

For customers with larger installs, we’ve been analyzing bottlenecks in both the monitoring process and the UI to try and make XI run faster and leaner. Users with hosts+services in the thousands will almost certainly see an improvement both in CPU load and page load times in the UI. For changes that affect the monitoring process, we updated the Monitoring Engine Event Queue dashlet and the Monitoring Engine Check Statistics Dashlets to all pull data from the same status information that the rest of XI uses, which reduces an enormous amount of data from needing to be logged to mysql from the monitoring process. The end result of this change is that mysql will only need to be doing about 30% of the work that it was having to do in previous releases. For large installs, this is a big deal!

The other key change that all users will probably see a benefit from is a refactoring of data queries for AJAX loaded content in the XI interface. Load times for dashlets that contain tactical or summary data went from 15-20 seconds per dashlet down to .05 seconds in local tests with 10k checks. The other upside of this change is that the CPU usage from XI users accessing the interface is substantially reduced. The Tactical Overview dashlets see the largest benefit in load times by far. For users who had to utilize the unified Tactical Overview for performance reasons, we encourage you to try the dashlet version in 1.4.

We hope to have 1.4 ready to release sometime this week, we appreciate our community of users and the feedback that we continue to get for our product. Thanks for helping us make XI better!

 

 

Nagios XI 1.3 New Features For Developers

It seems almost daily that we get new feature requests for Nagios XI, and thanks to a great extensible design by Ethan Galstad, the development team here at Nagios is able to produce new features and components for Nagios XI on a fairly regular basis. However, as the popularity of Nagios XI continues to grow, so does the need for custom features, modifications, and tools for our customers to use. We’ve added several new features and developer hooks into this most recent version of Nagios XI that we wanted to highlight for users who are interested in creating their own custom feature.

#1. Custom login splash. Several of our resellers have requested the ability to customize the login splash page when users log in to direct their end users to their own support channels and services. We’ve add the ability to allow users to specify their own PHP include for that splash by using the Custom Login Component. A template splash file has been added to the Nagios XI directory tree, and will be preserved through upgrades if users want to modify it. This file is located at /usr/local/nagiosxi/html/loginsplash.inc.php.

#2. Custom status column. We’ve added some new callback functions with this release of Nagios XI, one of which is a callback that allows users to add a new table column to the host or service status tables in Nagios XI. A developer example that adds the host notes field to the status tables can be downloaded from the following link. Custom Column Component.

#3. Custom table icons. Thanks to active community member jsmurphy for this one. We’ve added a new callback function in Nagios XI where custom table icons can be inserted the status tables to act as links, or to perform special actions. This feature is demonstrated in the latest version of the Graph Explorer component, where it inserts a graph icon that can be clicked to show a performance graph pop up for the selected host or service right from the status table.

 

The bottom line is, we love feature ideas! We base our development priorities largely on what users are requesting from us, so if there’s a feature you want to see in Nagios XI, by all means post a request to tracker.nagios.com or discuss an idea with our tech team at our Nagios Ideas forum.

 

Nagios Fusion Operations Center Component

The Nagios Fusion Operations Center Component provides a single looking glass to all unhandled host and service problems across multiple Nagios XI servers. This component is intended to be a read-only viewing screen screen to watch for problems in a distributed monitoring environment. Currently this component only fuses data from Nagios XI servers, aggregation of Nagios Core servers to come in a future release.

Download Nagios Fusion Operations Center Component

 

Nagios XI Internationalization

After an enormous amount of manual “search and replace” throughout the Nagios XI code base, we are proud to announce that starting with Nagios XI 2012R1.3, there will be internationalization support for the XI interface. We’ve created a default PO language file that users can either contribute back to XI, or use privately within their organization. The language file covers almost all of the XI codebase, and all of the components developed by Nagios Enterprises. We’re currently looking for community members willing to contribute completed, or even partially completed translation files for the XI interface. We currently have contributors who have started working on Spanish and Korean translations, but we’re looking for many more! The default translation file can be downloaded from the link below, and translated with the Poedit application.

Nagios XI Default Language File Download