Reporting for Duty: Inside Nagios XI’s Revealing Reports

Nagios XI comes pre-loaded with a robust collection of customizable, downloadable, emailable, and exportable reports. State history and performance data are automatically stored as soon as you begin monitoring hosts and services, and reports give you access to the tale of the tape.

Reports can be viewed, exported as various file types, and emailed in the Standard Edition of XI. Reports can be scheduled for automatic delivery in the Enterprise Edition. In this article, we’ll take a look at each report to give you an idea of the value each provides. To learn more about all of the various settings available to help you narrow down and fine-tune what your reports display, you can take a look at this document:

Generating Reports in Nagios XI

Available Reports

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary report consolidates Availability, Top Alert Producers, the Alert Histogram, and Latest Alerts into a single report, providing an excellent high-level look at the performance of your infrastructure.

Availability

This report provides pie charts indicating the percentage of the chosen time period that your selected hosts, services, or groups were working or in problem states such as Warning, Critical, and Unreachable.

SLA

The SLA report is an Enterprise Edition feature that provides an easy way to verify whether you’ve met your SLA targets for monitored objects and groups. Simply choose the whens and whats to get results:

State History

State History provides a detailed, change-by-change look at issues and recoveries over time.

Top Alert Producers

Gain insight into which hosts and services had the most issues during the selected time period with Top Alert Producers.

Alert Histogram

Alert Histogram provides a compact graph of the number of alerts over time.

Notifications

The Notifications report provides a list of all notifications sent by Nagios XI for the selected objects over the selected time period.

Event Log

The Event Log lists Nagios Core engine events, including alerts and retention data auto-saves (the function of Core that saves current state history in the retention.dat file so that if the Core engine is restarted, the state can be referenced as the last known state).

Bandwidth Usage

The Bandwidth Usage report shows daily, weekly, monthly, and annual traffic graphs for each interface you monitor with the Network Switch/Router wizard, along with In/Out/Max/Sum data in a table at the bottom.

Capacity Planning

This Enterprise Edition feature enables you to project future usage based on the historical performance data you’ve collected to help you stay ahead of resource overload and roll out upgrades before they impact your key business processes.

Network Report

This report provides chord diagrams showing top talkers in your network, based on flow data collected by Nagios Network Analyzer. It’s quick and easy to integrate Network Analyzer with XI, and these reports begin to provide data as soon as the two tools are linked.

Network Query

The second Network Analyzer report available in XI, Network Query puts all of the queries you’ve created in Network Analyzer at your fingertips:

Data Visualizations

Alert Heatmap

The Alert Heatmap provides a visually striking perspective on the intensity of alerts over time.

Alert Stream

This handy stream graph provides a visual representation of the quantity of alerts over time:

Alert Timeline

View all of the alerts detected by Nagios over time with the Alert Timeline and click on any of the event dots for further details about the individual event.

Network Replay

Network Replay is a great visualization that combines time with topology, enabling you to play through state changes over time, viewed on the Hypermap network diagram.

Legacy Reports

In this section you’ll find the basic legacy Nagios Core reports, in case you’d like to view them inside of Nagios XI.

Audit Log

The Audit Log is also worth a mention, providing details on the usage and functions of your XI system. This Enterprise Edition report can be filtered by User Interface, Core Config Manager, Subsystem, API, Core, and Other for quick access to specific subsets of audit data. For example, filtering by User Interface will show you when users accessed the web UI:

Graphs

Although performance graphs do make an appearance in regular reports such as Bandwidth Usage, Nagios XI has an array of additional graphing tools built in. To learn more about those, you can take a look at this article:

Use Nagios XI Graphs to Illuminate Your Infrastructure

Getting Started

If you’d like to try out all of the reports yourself, you can take the free 30-day trial for a spin:

Nagios XI Free Trial Downloads

If you need a hand during your trial, we have a variety of resources available. Email us at sales@nagios.com, and we’d be happy to assist you.