A Few Questions about NagiosXi

This support forum board is for support questions relating to Nagios XI, our flagship commercial network monitoring solution.
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bepstein
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:54 am

A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by bepstein »

Support,

I sent these questions to sales@nagios.com, and they redirected me here.

We are using Nagios Core for a lot of our monitoring and have been looking into NagiosXI for its advanced features.

I have installed the 60 day VM for testing, but wanted to ask a couple questions first.

One of our main goals deals with configuration. We have admins who need to configure from the CLI for bulk updates which we use scripts for. Other admins need GUI access to configure individual hosts or tweak configurations.

Is NagiosXI interchangeable as far as configuration goes? We would be using CLI and GUI on the same hosts and services. We are a small shop, so we can use simple locking mechanisms to avoid race conditions.

We also back up our configuration with Subversion so that we can track changes. Is this functionality available with NagiosXI? It is what we are currently using with the configs now on Core.

Last, we want to build a redundant pair of Nagios servers to run active/standby. This would allow us to repair one of the servers while the other continues to work. Is this redundancy available with NagiosXI?

Thanks for your help,
Brian
mmestnik
Posts: 972
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:23 pm

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by mmestnik »

For now, this is the correct place.

It may be possible to do bulk updates using the configuration importer. However versioning of the configuration may not be vary easy. Though you could do a vendor import of the read-only directory Nagios reads it's configuration from.

Here is how things break down.
All the configuration is stored in SQL and pushed to flat files through the web interface and Nagios is reloaded. If the reload fails the old configuration is put back. This is a one way overwriting replication.

There is no CLI aside from wget.

All the active/passive/distributed features work just as they did with Nagios Core.
bepstein
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:54 am

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by bepstein »

So, if I edit from the CLI and restart Nagios, it will work until the next time someone makes a change in the GUI, which will overwrite my changes.
Is there a way that I can import the flat files into the database everytime I edit from the CLI?

As far as the high availability pair, are you saying that Nagios Core can do this already?

Thanks,
Brian
tonyyarusso
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Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2010 12:38 pm
Location: St. Paul, MN, USA
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Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by tonyyarusso »

Is there a way that I can import the flat files into the database everytime I edit from the CLI?
An excellent question... It should be technically feasible, although I don't know of an easy way to accomplish it currently. What we would need is a command line way to hook into XI's configuration importer, but I'm not sure what it would take to implement that at this point.
As far as the high availability pair, are you saying that Nagios Core can do this already?
Yes - http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html
Tony Yarusso
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mmestnik
Posts: 972
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:23 pm

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by mmestnik »

I did some checking according to our PDF documentation there is a "/static" folder that you can place custom config objects. The sacrifice is that these will not show up in the Configuration GUI.

As far as how long local changes will be in effect, they are reloaded by cron jobs... So they might be changed at any time.
bepstein
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:54 am

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by bepstein »

As far as the high availability pair, are you saying that Nagios Core can do this already?
Yes - http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html
I've been reading through this document, but I'm not sure if it covers what we are trying to do. It seems like this setup requires a single central monitoring server. This remains a single point of failure.

We'd like to have two totally redundant servers so if one fails, or needs to go down for maintenance, the secondary takes over. I might be missing something in the documentation, but is it possible to have 2 redundant central monitoring servers?

I'm still trying to think of the best way to edit on the CLI and re-import into the GUI.

Thanks,
Brian
Last edited by bepstein on Fri Mar 26, 2010 9:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
bepstein
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2010 10:54 am

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by bepstein »

mmestnik wrote:I did some checking according to our PDF documentation there is a "/static" folder that you can place custom config objects. The sacrifice is that these will not show up in the Configuration GUI.
Great find. I've been looking over this. It is feasible that we use the static directory for testing new configs that we need to script, when they are done being tested, then importing them into the GUI.

I'm going to test importing a large config, then turning off the cron jobs, making a large batch of CLI changes, and then re-importing to see if that works.

Thanks,
Brian
mmestnik
Posts: 972
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:23 pm

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by mmestnik »

bepstein wrote:
As far as the high availability pair, are you saying that Nagios Core can do this already?
Yes - http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html
I've been reading through this document, but I'm not sure if it covers what we are trying to do. It seems like this setup requires a single central monitoring server. This remains a single point of failure.

We'd like to have two totally redundant servers so if one fails, or needs to go down for maintenance, the secondary takes over. I might be missing something in the documentation, but is it possible to have 2 redundant central monitoring servers?
Sorry the correct link is:
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/redundancy.html
mmestnik
Posts: 972
Joined: Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:23 pm

Re: A Few Questions about NagiosXi

Post by mmestnik »

bepstein wrote:
mmestnik wrote:I did some checking according to our PDF documentation there is a "/static" folder that you can place custom config objects. The sacrifice is that these will not show up in the Configuration GUI.
Great find. I've been looking over this. It is feasible that we use the static directory for testing new configs that we need to script, when they are done being tested, then importing them into the GUI.

I'm going to test importing a large config, then turning off the cron jobs, making a large batch of CLI changes, and then re-importing to see if that works.
Great, I look forward to hearing the results. There were some reports of the "replace" feature of the importer not functioning.
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