Prometheus Monitoring with Nagios XI: Installing the Exporters

Integrating Prometheus with Nagios XI combines powerful time-series monitoring with flexible alerting and visualization. By leveraging Prometheus’s efficient data collection and querying capabilities alongside Nagios XI’s mature alerting and escalation workflows, IT teams can monitor systems more proactively and respond to anomalies faster. In this guide, we’ll walk through configuring Prometheus to export metrics, for both Windows and Linux.

Prerequisites

• You have Internet or Ethernet access
• Your host is running Linux or Windows

Installing the Windows Exporter from Prometheus Community GitHub onto a Windows Host

1. Download the latest version from GitHub

• Go to https://github.com/prometheus-community/windows_exporter
• Look for the latest release and download the amd64.msi file

2. Run the installer

• In the initial Custom Setup section, choose Entire feature will be installed on local hard drive under Firewall Exception. This will add an inbound permission for the Exporter listening port.

• Click all the options that say Next or Proceed in the installer
  • You do not need to change or add any other information to use the Prometheus Wizard in Nagios XI, you can simply keep the defaults.

• It will say it is installed
• (Optional): Confirm it is up and running by entering http://<HOST_IP>:9182/metrics

With all the above steps completed, your Windows system is now properly configured for Prometheus monitoring, and you’re ready to move on to integrating it with Nagios XI.

Installing and Running the Prometheus Node Exporter on a Linux Host

1. Download the latest version using command line

• Go to https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/node-exporter/
• Right click the Linux download link and select Copy Link to get exactly what you need to enter in the below wget command.
• On your Linux host, open the terminal
• Run the following command:
  

# wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v<VERSION>/node_exporter-<VERSION>.<OS>-<ARCH>.tar.gz

This will download the Node Exporter to your Linux host.

2. Run Node Explorer

• Run the following commands:
  • tar xvfz node_exporter-*.*-amd64.tar.gz
  • cd node_exporter-*.*-amd64
  • ./node_exporter

With these above steps completed, your Linux host is ready for Prometheus monitoring, and we are ready to move on to integrating with Nagios XI.

Conclusion

With this, we’ve set it up the data exporters and are ready to configure monitoring in Nagios XI, enabling us to gather all of the same data the same way that Prometheus does, giving us access to the detailed information it provides while showing the data in XI in a clear way.