Get Holistic With 4 Nagios Solutions
Metrics such as up/down status, system performance, log data, bandwidth, and network flow data all provide valuable insights individually. The combined visibility of all these elements has become increasingly essential as IT infrastructure complexity increases, security threats become more plentiful and sophisticated, and the resource demands of your users and customers continue to grow. Nagios solutions are well-equipped to provide the holistic perspective you need.
Each Nagios product not only individually provides visibility into purpose-built aspects of the health of your systems, sites, and networks, but they can also be combined to achieve centralized views and management of issues and indicators identified by the entire Nagios Suite. This capability not only empowers you to quickly catch the ‘what’ of problems as they arise, but also helps you answer the more difficult question of ‘why’.
For example, if your Nagios XI monitoring shows heavy CPU, memory, and interface utilization on a webserver, the added power of Nagios Log Server and Nagios Network Analyzer would enable you to determine the regions and IPs the abnormal traffic may be coming from, and other key insights like failed login attempts to help you get to the bottom of the situation.
We’ll begin by providing a brief outline of each Nagios tool, then discuss how they can be integrated to provide comprehensive insight into your infrastructure.
Nagios Solutions Overview
Nagios XI is our monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting solution for status and performance metrics on servers, hypervisors, network equipment, websites, and more. Built on the time-tested Nagios Core engine, XI includes a robust collection of built-in monitoring wizards, and can be expanded with the thousands of free plugins on the Nagios Exchange community site, and custom plugins written by users.
Nagios Log Server is our centralized log collection, analysis, archiving, and alerting tool perfect for leveraging log data from many different systems and applications. Log Server’s clustering capabilities provide scalability and data protection, and built-in setup guides simplify sending data from common source types.
Nagios Network Analyzer is our network flow data collection, analysis, and alerting tool. Network Analyzer supports a variety of flow protocols including Netflow, sFlow, Jflow, and IPFIX. Network Analyzer provides insight into the origin and destination IPs and ports, protocols, and related volume of packets that compose your network traffic.
Working Well with Others
Several options are available for centralizing visibility of data from across the Nagios solutions stack. One great option is to consolidate check results in Nagios XI. Doing so provides the ability to not only visualize combined status data in areas like Dashboards and Reports, but also to manage alert settings (such as how often checks are run, who alerts should be sent to, and even more advanced options like escalation options) and handle alert acknowledgement from a centralized location.
Nagios Log Server and Nagios Network Analyzer alerts can be easily added to Nagios XI using the built-in monitoring wizards. The Nagios Log Server wizard enables alerts based on existing saved queries, or on custom Lucene or JSON queries created on the fly. The Nagios Network Analyzer wizard enables monitoring of bytes, flows, and packets from your flow data Sources, Sourcegroups, and Views. You also have the option of sending alert data upstream from Nagios Log Server and Network Analyzer to Nagios XI using the built-in NRDP (Nagios Remote Data Processor) passive agent or SNMP Traps (Simple Network Management Protocol).
Another great integration option is the ability to include Nagios Network Analyzer reports in Nagios XI. The Network Report provides Top Talkers data and visualizations for your Sources and Sourcegroups, and the Network Query Report enables you to access your custom queries inside of XI.
Single Pane of Glass
As scale increases, it may be necessary to split your monitoring between multiple Nagios XI servers to accommodate the increased check load. This is also a great architectural option in infrastructures that span multiple data centers, where local monitoring and global visibility are desired. Nagios Fusion provides a centralized tactical overview of data from across your XI deployment, as well as to the data they collect from your Log Server and Network Analyzer servers.
Nagios Fusion includes a variety of Log Server and Network Analyzer dashlets for easy inclusion of details such as alert history and cluster statistics in your Dashboards and Views. Additionally, Fusion provides quick access to both the Homepage and specific host and service detail pages on your Nagios XI servers with a single click. Here’s an example of a Fusion Dashboard displaying combined data from Nagios XI, Nagios Log Server, and Nagios Network Analyzer:
Ultimately, no single piece of software can provide in-depth insight into every data point necessary to solve complex problems. However, the great news is that combining the powerful capabilities of these Nagios solutions will empower you with the holistic perspective you need to tackle the complex challenges of your unique infrastructure, prevent and reduce problems, and keep things running smoothly and securely.
