Ready to Rock: What’s New in Log Server 2024R2
Nagios Log Server 2024R2 is fully updated, fully modern, and ready to rock!
For the last 10 years, Nagios Log Server has provided users with a powerful log collection, analysis, archiving, and alerting solution. We’re excited to announce the release of Log Server 2024R2, and in this article we’ll discuss the major frontend and backend updates and improvements you’ll discover in the new major release.
User Interface: The Next Generation
When you download the new Log Server 2024R2 release, the first thing you’ll notice is the beautiful new user interface, coded from scratch by the Nagios development team. Check out how easy it is to manage Dashboard panels now! :
The new UI is crisp, clean, and fast. This change will provide greater flexibility and agility to our developers, enabling them to quickly incorporate new ideas, respond to customer feedback, and cultivate Log Server’s look and feel in the future. For example, creating the new Dark Theme and Light Theme:
One change that might take a moment to get used to is that the menu bar is now on the left, and icon-based, just like the Nagios XI Neptune theme you may already use. Aside from that, longtime Log Server users will still feel right at home, as we’ve kept the menu structure and location of key functions the same.
Another major enhancement comes in how panels are managed in your Dashboards.
Major Backend Updates
The improvements in Log Server 2024R2 go far beyond the stunning new UI, extending to the core components of the tool. First off, the datastore has been shifted from Elasticsearch to Opensearch 2.14.0. Secondly, Logstash has been updated to v8.13.4. These updates will provide you with improved security and functionality in your Log Server deployment.
The upgrade to Opensearch means that Log Server users will now benefit from the uniform field labeling and hierarchical tree structure of the Elastic Common Schema (ECS). For example, information such as the host name of different types of log sources will be uniformly placed into a common field, in this case host.hostname.
In previous versions of Log Server, this would have been Hostname for Windows sources, and hostname for Linux sources, causing no results to show in the case of simple capitalization mistakes when composing queries. Setting up queries and alerts to find the important log entries you’re after will be quicker and easier going forward, since the fields for common attributes will have the same name and capitalization regardless of the source type.
You’ll also notice that in R2, significantly more fields are parsed in your syslog data, including data such as process.name, service.type, log.syslog.severity.code, and log.syslog.severity.name, further enabling you to quickly narrow down datasets in your queries.
Migration Made Easy
Due to the upgrade from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch an inline upgrade from R1 to R2 isn’t possible, but we have created a GUI-based migration tool to help existing users migrate their data and to a new R2 deployment. The tool makes migrating the following to your new R2 deployment a snap:
- The log data contained in the Elasticsearch engine.
- User accounts
- Configuration
- Queries
- History
- Alerts
More Resources
A great way to dive in and learn all about the changes is this recent webinar:
Nagios Log Server 2024R2 Showcase
Fully-updated documentation for Log Server 2024R2 can be found in the Admin Guide:
Nagios Log Server Administrator Guide
Learn how to monitor your Log Server cluster intelligently with Business Process Intelligence here:
Nagios XI BPI: Actionable Insights for IT Monitoring and Optimization
Learn how Log Server can help empower you with a holistic perspective your your infrastructure’s health here:
