Over the past few years, there’s been a strong outpouring of requests for an updated interface for Nagios. We released Nagios V-Shell just about a year ago now, and we’re happy to see that it currently stands as the most popular item on the Nagios Exchange, with over 100,000 views! I don’t usually post to labs every time I make an update to V-Shell, but I thought this time around would be worth mentioning. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing a major overhaul of the permissions in order to mirror the same permissions scheme that people are used to in Nagios Core. Initially V-Shell has limited user-level control in regards to permissions, but as of v1.8 I’m pleased to say I’ve finally got that major TODO crossed off my list. V-Shell now supports user-level access, as well as read-only access to match the permissions scheme of Nagios Core. Feel free to check out V-Shell 1.8 on the Nagios Exchange.
Author Archive for mikeguthrie
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We had a cool meeting last week with one of our users, and he gave us some great suggestions for tweaks and improvements. One of his ideas was adding the ability to “schedule immediate checks” in bulk, so that once problems are fixed, admins can quickly cross hosts and services off the list of problems. As our user said, “I’m not so much interested in what is working as I am what’s not working.” Since the logic and filtering was already in place with the Mass Acknowledgment Component, I decided to simply add “schedule immediate check” to the list of options with this component. Thanks user TL for the suggestion! As developers, we love feedback, and usually our best ideas come from users, so keep the ideas coming! : )
We’ve had a few users request the use of the “action_ur”l and” notes_url” config options to be accessible from the XI details screen. Nothing terribly fancy with this component, just another option for those users who need it. As Nagios developers, we love feedback, and we love to know what you guys need from our software, so keep the suggestions coming!
With a project that started last December by translating comments from German, I’m relieved to see this project reach a stage where I feel comfortable showing the public. Nagios CCM (Core Config Manager) is a forked revision of the project NagiosQL 3.0 by Martin Willisegger. The code underneath dramatically overhauls the front-end logic, strives to improve X-browser compatibility, and ultimately paves the way for easier maintenance and improvements down the road. The database structure and underlying classes remain the same as the NagiosQL project, but the front-end has been entirely rebuilt, and the client side interactions are rewritten in JQuery in hopes to make community developments easier. Currently the Nagios CCM Beta only works on an XI install, but we’re hoping to release a community version that will work on Core installs later this year. New features in the Nagios CCM include:
- The ability to test host and service checks directly from the web interface
- Plugin documentation can be viewed from the web interface
- Search filters built into every page
- Improved pagination
- Group relationships can be see from both group->object and object->group directions.
- Improved user feedback from the database and it’s relationships
Although the Nagios CCM is far from finished, we wanted to give users a chance to check things out and get a feel for where this project will be headed.
If you’re a Nagios XI user, and you want to test out the CCM on your test environment, you can install the latest revision of the CCM with the following instructions.
Install Instructions: cd /tmp wget http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/exchange/nagiosccm/CCM.tar.gz tar zxf CCM.tar.gz ./install-CCM.sh
Access the new CCM Beta from the Nagios XI->Configure->Nagios CCM BETA (link).
Ok, so admittedly this is not a “new” component, since it was released back in February.
However after an interesting discussion with our team this week, we realized again how large the Nagios
community is, and keeping up with all of the latest new features and
Customized RSS Feed In Nagios XI
developments internally can sometimes be a challenge. So I thought I’d take a moment to point out a tool that can be used to keep your Nagios XI installation running with all of the latest features, plugins, and capabilities. The Custom RSS Feed dashlet allows you to define up to 5 RSS feeds and compile them into a scrolling list on your dashboard. Why would this be useful for an admin? Here’s a thought:
Nagios Library – Latest Customer Downloads Feed
Nagios Libary – Latest Documentation Feed
Nagios Exchange – New Project Listings Feed
Nagios Exchange – Updated Projects Feed
Nagios Labs – This website’s feed : )
Download the Nagios XI - Custom RSS Dashlet from Nagios Exchange.
My brother (a fellow programmer) once told me, “the solution is easy once you know what it is.” That’s been the case for the finishing touches needed to finally release a component that I’ve been excited about for a long time: The Nagios XI Graph Explorer. This component utilizes a javascript visualization library and allows users to easily zoom graphs, select custom time frames, and even stack time periods on top of each other to compare performance from one time period to the next. If you like data visualization, you’ll love this tool. Currently this download is for current Nagios XI customers only and can be downloaded from the Nagios XI Customer Downloads page, and I recommend using this with Firefox for maximum reliability. Special thanks to Nicholas Scott for accidentally pointing out the solution to the problem that’s been in front of my face the whole time ; )
We’ve had some requests in past months about developer documentation for writing custom Configuration Wizards for Nagios XI. Many admins have a large amount of devices of a specific type that they regularly need to add to their monitoring environment. So for those needing to write their own wizard, and don’t mind getting their hands dirty with PHP development, this document and example code illustrate how to write a monitoring wizard while maintaining the integrity of the Nagios XI framework. The example wizard utilizes a weather alerts check plugin written by Tony Yarusso. You can find the document on the Nagios Library.
A few weeks back we had a user request if there was some way they could acknowledge multiple services at once. As we looked through our software we realized we didn’t have a simple way to do this. I searched the nagios exchange, and although there were some scripts that did this, they didn’t have any way to handle hosts or service problems selectively. So we went to work and developed the Mass Acknowledgment Component that bring up a list of all unhandled problem hosts and services, and lets you pick from a list of items that you can either acknowledge or schedule flexible downtime for. This should be handy for admins who have a large outage and need to quickly acknowledge dozens or even hundreds of services at once. Installation is quick and easy, just access the Nagios XI Admin->Manage Components page and upload the zip.
Mass Acknowledgment Component
Get the download here.
In the past months we’ve had several requests for better control and time specifications for Nagios performance graphs, and me being a big fan of fancy visualizations, I’ve been staring at the old PNP graphs for a while and wondering if there’s a way we can create graphs that look like they’re actually from this decade. After reviewing several different visualization libraries, we decided to take a stab at developing some new tools with some graphing libraries from HighCharts. Although some of the fine details are still being polished, our first prototype has us pretty excited about where this project is headed.
JQuery Performance Graphs in XI
Our first prototype is a zoomable performance graph, that allows you to specify start/stop times, and then dynamically zoom the graph all the way down to a 5mn interval for closer examination. Although these graphs are client-side, they can all be exported into either png, pdf, jpg, or SVG images to use in external reporting or presentations. Let us know what you think!
We came across an issue about a month ago where a user was losing data with a distributed/passive checks setup. Upon a closer investigation we uncovered that all of the passive checks were being executed every 5 minutes from servers that were all synced to the same time server. The result? Hundreds of checks were all coming in with a few seconds, putting a heavy load on Nagios, while the other 4 minutes and 50 seconds were going virtually unused by the server. After some discussion on this we decided to make use of a built-in tool for Nagios - nagiostats – and create a wizard that could monitor Nagios itself to see how the checks were coming in and being processed. Although multiple checks have been written in the past, we’ve created a new wizard that allows you to quickly create several checks against the nagiostats binary to monitor the monitoring environment itself. We’ve just released a 1.0 version of this wizard and we’re curious to know what users think of it. Feel free to give it a try and send us your feedback!
Wizard Preview
Graphs from the Nagiostats Wizard
