Archive for the 'UI' Category

Nagios XI 2012r1.4 Improvements

By Mike Guthrie on January 14, 2013

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!

 

 

Category: Development, Internationalization, Nagios XI, Performance, UI and Uncategorized. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Nagios XI 1.3 New Features For Developers

By Mike Guthrie on December 18, 2012
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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.

 

Category: Community, Components, Cool Stuff, Development, Graphs, Nagios XI, Tech Tips, UI and Uncategorized. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Nagios Fusion 2012 Preview

By Mike Guthrie on May 24, 2012
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Need a simpler solution for scaling Nagios?  Distributed monitoring environments often contain several Nagios servers in order to cover multiple geographic or network locations, or sometimes just to scale large enough on a single network.  Nagios Fusion 2012 is a central dashboard and data aggregation for all of your Nagios installations.  Fusion 2012 will integrate seamlessly with Nagios XI and Nagios Core 3.x installs, and requires no additional configuration changes on any of your Nagios servers.  Here’s a highlight of the current feature list:

 

  • Unified authentication for all Nagios XI servers
  • User-defined, customizable dashboards and menus
  • Easily drill down to any Nagios server to find problems
  • Fused Tactical Overview information
  • Fused Health Summaries for Nagios servers
  • Fused  Alert Summary
  • Fused Alert Histogram
  • Fused Top Alert Producers
  • Several new data visualizations

 

The power exists in Nagios Fusion to aggregate almost any information across multiple Nagios installs.  The main question we’re looking at from here is: “What do users want to see in their central Nagios dashboard?”  We’re interested in getting some user feedback for ideas on this project as well as some beta testers for the upcoming release.  Here are some screenshots to give an idea as to what is to come.

 

Category: Development, Distributed Monitoring, Nagios Fusion, UI, Uncategorized and Visualizations. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Nagios V-Shell 1.9 Released

By Mike Guthrie on February 29, 2012
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Nagios V-Shell 1.9 includes major performance updates, and a re-implementation of PHP caching that should decrease V-Shell page load times anywhere from 40-75%.  I ran some benchmarking tests on a test system(Dual core desktop with 4GB of RAM) with 1800 hosts, and 7200 services.  This system runs with an average CPU load of 2.0-6.0 throughout the day, so the hardware is being pushed pretty hard already from the check load. V-Shell 1.8 created page load times anywhere from 18-28 seconds throughout the interface without APC caching enabled.  Needless to say, this is problematic for many users with larger environments.  The Core cgi’s were able to load anywhere from 2-11 seconds, with the service status page taking around 9-11 seconds to load all of the data.  My goal for 1.9 was to minimize any unnecessary processing, and optimize any functions that were inefficient or using slower PHP built-in functions.  The differences in 1.9 are substantial.  Without any caching enabled at all, I was able to decrease the average page load time to 9-14 seconds, which is 40-50% faster by itself.  Once I had the code optimized, I reworked the APC caching functionality.  If a user has PHP’s APC caching packages installed and enabled on their web server, V-Shell will cached the objects.cache file until it detects any changes in the file, while the data in the status.dat file will be cached based on a TTL (time to live) config option which now exists in 1.9.  Once the data is cached in APC, the page load times throughout the interface averaged between 4-5 seconds for all pages, which is a 75% decrease in load time on average.

My goal for the next version of V-Shell is to add support for mklivestatus and ndoutils for backend data, which will eliminate the need to parse the objects.cache file and status.dat files for systems with those backends.  This should further improve performance for larger installations.

Download Nagios V-Shell 1.9

CHANGELOG

 

Category: Community, Development, Nagios Core, Performance and UI. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Nagios XI Operations Screen For Your NOC Monitors

By Ethan Galstad on January 20, 2012

A new Nagios XI user asked us to integrate a dashboard into Nagios XI that could be used to display the status of everything that’s being monitored on a NOC screen. We modified an existing project to work with Nagios XI’s authorization functions and voila – a new awesome operations screen for Nagios!

You can download the opscreen component from Nagios Exchange.

Category: Awesome, Nagios XI, UI and Visualizations. 11 Comments

Nagios Mobile 1.0

By Mike Guthrie on December 21, 2011
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Nagios Mobile is a lightweight web interface, based on the Teeny Nagios project by Hirose Masaaki. Nagios Mobile is a PHP web-based application designed for Mobile and touch-screen devices.

Key Features:
- User-level authorization for hosts, services, and commands that match Nagios Core.
- Filtered lists to quickly identify and respond to unhandled problems
- Acknowledge problems, Disable/Enable Notifications, or Schedule Downtime for authorized hosts and services
- Works with any Nagios 3.x installation
- Support for APC data caching for faster page loads
- Support for both webkit and non-webkit enabled devices

My favorite kinds of development projects always end up being on the front-end, and I certainly can’t claim much on the interface design for this project, as that goes to community member Hirose Masaaki using the JQuery Mobile framework.  We loved the front-end design that he came up with for the Teeny Nagios project, so we did some revisions to the server-side code underneath to allow for host and service filtering by state, more complex permissions, data caching, and improved scalability for larger installations.    We also added some code to allow Nagios Mobile to work from essentially any mobile browser.

Download Nagios Mobile.

 

 

Category: Mobile, Nagios Core, Nagios XI, UI, Uncategorized and Visualizations. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Nagios BPI v2.0 Beta

By Mike Guthrie on December 2, 2011

One of the most challenging, but also rewarding projects that I’ve worked on so far during my time at Nagios is the Nagios Business Process Intelligence (BPI) project.  Nagios BPI was created as a way to visualize business process health by grouping hosts and services together, and creating rules to discern the true health of the network infrastructure as it relates to the business. An admin can define rules for each BPI group, and monitor the health of the group’s state based on what has been defined.  Version 1.x of BPI got a lot of positive feedback from users, and quite a few feature requests.  However, as time went on it became clear that in order for BPI to be more suitable for enterprise environments, more advanced permissions needed to be implemented, as well as several other usability issues resolved.  I’ve spent the last 6 weeks or so doing some seriously overhauling to the code in order to support a lot of the new features I wanted to add to a new version of BPI.  I’m excited about the changes in this new version, and I also really think that this is an add-on to Nagios that can really do some good in a lot of monitoring environments.  I think the future of monitoring is going to highlight the idea of monitoring within the context of the business, and this project allows users to turn host and service monitoring into actual business process monitoring.  Currently this project is in a beta stage and only works with Nagios XI, and we plan to implement this as a feature of our 2012 release.  A community version of Core will follow sometime later in 2012, but the intention is to pilot a lot of these new features in the XI environment, and later the code can be adapted to allow for use with Core installs as well.     Here’s a highlight of the new features in BPI v2.0

  • AJAX based updates keep the data fresh without ever having to refresh the page
  • BPI Groups can be automatically generated and synced with existing hostgroups and servicegroups, and rules can be set for determining their group states.
  • Improved permissions scheme.  Only Admin-level users can add, modify, or delete groups.  All other users can be added as “read-only” users for each group, which allows for use of BPI in multi-tenancy installs of XI.
  • Groups can now be sorted by problem “weight,” which allows for quicker identification of problems within the business process.
  • Group state calculations now use health percentages instead of problem counts in determining group states.
  • Group state calculations can account for “handled” problems in the logic, as defined as a config option.
  • More informational feedback for the check plugin so a user knows “why” a group is in a problem state.
  • Created an XML cache/API for reduced CPU usage for BPI checks, and also to allow external applications to access the data.

See the updated documentation for BPI v2 here.

The code for this new version has not yet been released. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in beta testing before the 2012 release of Nagios XI.  Here are a few screenshots from the new version.

 

 

Category: Business Monitoring, Components, Development, Nagios XI, Tech Tips, UI, Uncategorized and Visualizations. 45 Comments Tags: , , .

Nagios V-Shell 1.8 Release

By Mike Guthrie on September 19, 2011

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.

Category: Community, Nagios Core and UI. 0 Comments Tags: , , .