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!
NRPE 2.14 Now Available
A new release of NPRE (2.14) is now available from SourceForge. This release contains a number of changes including enhanced support for AIX as well a patch to prevent a potential security issue arising from passing bash command substitutions as arguments.
Enjoy!
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
Nagios Network Analyzer Public Beta Download
Due to the overwhelming demand for the Nagios Network Analyzer public beta interest, instead of the more focus-group oriented beta style, we will be posting the download link and install instructions at the bottom of this post.
If you use it, please do keep in mind it is still beta, and there is a feature freeze, as in bugs have the highest priority. Please inform send bug reports or feedback to nscott@nagios.com.
Install Instructions
Getting Started Instructions
Building a Nagios 4 / Nagios XI Prototype Box
So after an awesome set of presentations at the Nagios World Conference 2012, one of the hot topics for discussion was clearly the upcoming Nagios Core 4 release. Andreas Ericsson has been hard at work overhauling the Core engine to optimize performance and reduce Disk and CPU usage for Nagios, and initial tests are showing his work has paid off in a substantial way. For this experiment, we’re going to use a system with the following specs:
- Virtual Machine running under Vmware Workstation 8
- 2GB of RAM
- 1 CPU, 4 Cores
- 80GB Hard Disk
- Nagios XI Installed
- Nagios binaries replace with Nagios 4 monitoring engine
- ndoutils binaries replaced with with the latest SVN code for ndoutils: nagios/ndoutils/branches/ndoutils-2-0
- No initial performance tweaks other than Nagios 4 and ndoutils 2
I’ll post setup instructions below for users who also want to play around with this setup. Note: This setup is not intended for production installs, use this in test environments only!
Start with Nagios XI installed, either through the pre-installed VM or with a manual installation. I chose a manual installation for this demo so I could set up the hardware to my liking and give it sufficient hard drive space to test a LOT of hosts. My first attempt at the prototype only had 10GB on the box, and filled up quite quickly because of performance data. .I ran the following commands after initial Nagios XI installation and setup was completed.
From the command-line:
cd /tmp yum install -y subversion svn co https://nagios.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nagios/ndoutils/branches/ndoutils-2-0 svn export ndoutils-2-0/ ndoutils svn co https://nagios.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nagios/nagioscore/trunk/ coretrunk svn export coretrunk/ nagioscore service nagios stop service ndo2db stop cd nagioscore ./configure --with-command-group=nagcmd make all make install cd /tmp/ndoutils ./configure; make; make install cd db ./upgradedb -u root -p nagiosxi -h localhost -d nagios service ndo2db start service nagios start
You can verify the upgrade succeeded by reviewing the /usr/local/nagios/var/nagios.log file. There should be some new warnings about obsolete definitions like “failure_prediction_enabled”, which we won’t worry about for now. For now I’d like to see what kind of performance impact I can expect for a large number of checks being run on this machine, so I need to quickly create a large number of checks. I’ll achieve this by running a tools script that we include with every installation of Nagios XI.
cd /usr/local/nagiosxi/tools ./create_checks.php --hosts=1000 --prefix=_MASS1_ > /usr/local/nagios/etc/static/_MASS1.cfg
I chose to use static configs instead of the CCM for this benchmark for ease of setup time, and also easy removal later on. This also creates a list of checks with 25% of the services showing up as critica, which is useful in testing a system stressed with alerts and notifications. However, I’m also going to turn off notifications and event handlers during this setup phase just to make sure I don’t bottleneck somewhere and tank the entire box. Now lets restart Nagios to start using the new configs.
service nagios restart
After adding 1000 hosts and 4000 services all at a 5mn interval the CPU load is running at a nominal level, averaging anywhere from .30 – .70, which is pretty impressive for a 4 core system! There is still some Disk IO because performance data processing is happening for each service, and this will likely be one of the noticeable bottlenecks as we add more checks to this system. After the system levels out and all of the checks are settled into a hard state, I turn on notifications and event handlers and begin watching the system and testing for bottlenecks. I’ll post back with some results soon! If there are any XI users out there who want to give this a shot in their test environments and post back with their results we’d love to hear what you find!
Integrating Mod Gearman with Nagios XI
Our newly released guide is now available on how to install Mod Gearman locally on your Nagios XI system(s) and from there tie it in with external worker systems to offload checks from the hardware Nagios XI resides on. This will reduce check latency and increase performance on your Nagios XI machine, allowing for greater check amounts while still keeping your system’s head above water. All this done with a simple install script for CentOS/RHEL versions 5 and 6.
The document is available here: Integrating Mod Gearman with Nagios XI
Nagios Network Analyzer Public Beta
A solution for evaluating and using Netflow and sFlow data has been on the horizon in the Nagios Labs here for a while, and we are now calling for public beta testers for the product. If you would be interested in beta testing such an application please note your interest in the comments below and I will contact you so that we can work together to resolve issues that present themselves in Nagios Network Analyzer.
Nagios Network Analyzer has direct integration with Nagios Core and Nagios XI, and is designed to be used in conjunction with either, while still containing enough of its own features to be functional as a standalone application. It is also designed be very intuitive to use, and to browse your flow data in as straightforward and painless a manner as possible, without sacrificing flexibility.
Continue reading ‘Nagios Network Analyzer Public Beta’
Nagios XI 2012 Public Beta
After many months of anticipation and hard work, we are pleased to announce Nagios XI 2012 Beta is ready for public testing! XI 2012 is loaded with a variety of new features, and we’d love your help in making sure that 2012 is ready for full release as soon as possible. A key difference with the release of 2012 is that there will be both an Enterprise Edition and a Standard Edition, with the Enterprise Edition being targeted at users with larger environments.
Continue reading ‘Nagios XI 2012 Public Beta’