Announcing the New Naming Convention for Nagios Enterprise Products

You may have noticed that the naming convention for several products has undergone a change.

Nagios Network Analyzer was the first product to make the transition to our new convention – moving from version 2014R1.9 to version 2R1.0. Nagios XI followed, moving from version 2014R2.7 to version 5R1.0. This change largely represents clarity and uniformity across our product line – the ultimate goal is reducing confusion.

We recently made a final revision to the naming convention to match standard Semantic Versioning. What this means is that moving forward, all products will use the following convention:

MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

Some of our products have already made the move, the rest will follow the new versioning convention in their respective releases.

 

Nagios XI

From: 5R1.0

To: 5.2.0

 

Nagios Log Server

From: 1R2.2

To: 1.2.3

 

The naming change also provides key benefits internally, including:

  • Increased development workflow clarity, especially regarding revision software.
  • The ability to better coordinate our releases by changing the appropriate version number.

In addition to the above benefits, we think that the new naming convention has a nice ring to it. We hope that the change isn’t too confusing – let us know if you have any questions!

FREAK Vulnerability Tester

With yesterday’s disclosure of the new SSL/TLS vulnerability dubbed FREAK, we at Nagios decided to take some action to assist the community with a quick and easy tester to help determine if a server is vulnerable to (CVE-2015-0204).

If you are not familiar with the FREAK Vulnerability, here is a brief description from https://freakattack.com/ :

A connection is vulnerable if the server accepts RSA_EXPORT cipher suites and the client either offers an RSA_EXPORT suite or is using a version of OpenSSL that is vulnerable to CVE-2015-0204. Vulnerable clients include many Google and Apple devices (which use unpatched OpenSSL), a large number of embedded systems, and many other software products that use TLS behind the scenes without disabling the vulnerable cryptographic suites.

 

At Nagios, we take security vulnerabilities very seriously and when possible like to offer the ability to perform a quick check directly from our website.

Enter FREAK Vulnerability Tester (CVE-2015-0204)

FREAK Vulnerability Tester (CVE-2015-0204)

 

Nagios Enterprises provides IT management solutions that monitor your network infrastructure, manage your network bandwidth, and can mitigate or even eliminate the effects of the FREAK Vulnerability as well as other security vulnerabilities.

For most servers that are found to be vulnerable administrators should be able to update the OpenSSL package and then restart the affected services such as httpd.

If your server is running RHEL or CentOS, the following commands will resolve the security vulnerability:

yum update openssl -y
service httpd restart

If you are already using Nagios Core or XI to monitor your infrastructure, this easy-to-use plugin can notify you if your system is susceptible to the FREAK vulnerability.

Download the check_freak Plugin

If you haven’t experienced the benefits of monitoring with Nagios, be sure to check out our products page.

How to Monitor MySQL Logs with Nagios Log Server

Many times when you run out of disk space on the Nagios XI server or you don’t shut down the VM properly, you end up with crashed tables in the MySQL database. One way to solve this issue is to monitor the mysqld.log for errors, and fix the problems in a timely matter. You can easily achieve this goal by monitoring the MySQL logs via  Nagios Log Server.

In this article, I will show you how to set up MySQL monitoring in Nagios Log Server, how to use simple searches and how to filter the results. Continue reading ‘How to Monitor MySQL Logs with Nagios Log Server’

Nagios XI VMware Virtualization Wizard Released

Nagios Enterprises is excited to announce the release of the VMware Virtualization Wizard for Nagios XI.

The VMware Virtualization Wizard monitors your VMware virtual environment by offloading the VMware checks to a vSphere Management Assistance (vMA) appliance.

This is achieved by utilizing the plugin box293_check_vmware, which has been written specifically for use on the vMA. Troy Lea (the author of box293_check_vmware) received a lot of feedback at the VMworld Conference after giving his talk on the plugin.

Why use the box293_check_vmware plugin? The plugin utilizes the VMware SDK. The SDK is notoriously CPU and Memory hungry, which can easily overload and cripple your Nagios XI host. By offloading the plugin to the vMA appliance, your Nagios XI server will not be affected as you monitor your VMware virtual environment.

The VMware Virtualization Wizard and installation instructions are available for download from the Nagios Exchange.

Continue reading ‘Nagios XI VMware Virtualization Wizard Released’