When evaluating Nagios XI vs Icinga 2, one important distinction often gets lost: many comparisons evaluate alternatives against Nagios Core, our free open-source monitoring engine, rather than Nagios XI, our full enterprise platform. That framing skews the picture.

This article breaks down how Nagios XI stacks up on the factors that matter most: cost, deployment, scalability, and configuration.

Why Teams Choose Nagios XI Over Icinga 2

Nagios Core has been the basis for IT monitoring solutions for the last two decades.

Its extensible plugin architecture has cemented it as the de facto industry leader. Yet, in interactions with enterprise customers, the following pain points were repeatedly brought to light: time-consuming configuration, custom dashboard development, configuration file hassle, and the need for vendor assistance with compliance.

Nagios XI was our answer to these challenges. Nagios took the tried-and-true Nagios Core monitoring engine and packaged it with an enterprise monitoring platform featuring Configuration Wizards, native dashboards, Auto-Discovery tools, and commercial support with service-level agreements.

A critical decision was to ensure robust backward compatibility with Nagios Core to make it seamless for existing Nagios customers to upgrade. Read more about Nagios XI enterprise features and capabilities.

Nagios XI vs. Icinga 2 Pricing: What Icinga’s ‘Free’ Actually Costs

One of the most frequently asked questions is:

“Why pay for Nagios XI if Icinga 2 is free?”

While a free open-source solution may seem appealing at first glance, the opportunity cost is often underestimated. Time spent on manual installation, configuration, ongoing maintenance, and troubleshooting can accumulate quickly — particularly for teams without deep Linux expertise.

For organizations where uptime and operational continuity are priorities, that hidden cost frequently outweighs the savings on licensing.

Icinga 2’s core software is free, but enterprise-level support incurs significant costs. For teams that rely on support to maintain production monitoring, total expenses can escalate quickly.

Typical costs include:

• Enterprise modules: €2,000/year.
• Enterprise support: €15,000–€30,000/year.
• Repository subscription (Enterprise Linux): €5,000/year.

Five-Year Total Cost Example (500-node deployment):

Based on published five-year pricing, Nagios XI with enterprise support included represents roughly 25–40% of Icinga’s total cost, with support bundled into the license.

Use the Nagios XI plan calculator to determine the price based on your deployment size.

Migrating from Nagios or Icinga? Here’s the Difference

Migrating from Nagios Core to Nagios XI is seamless. XI supports direct import of existing configurations, object definitions, and plugins without requiring a new syntax or language. Many teams complete migration within hours or a few days, preserving years of monitoring expertise.

Nagios provides automatic migration tools to streamline the process. For a full walkthrough:

• Step-by-step migration guide (PDF)
• Migration from Nagios Core to Nagios XI (video)
  

Migrating from Nagios to Icinga 2, by contrast, requires manual conversion into Icinga’s domain-specific language (DSL). Icinga’s official migration documentation explicitly states that scripted one-to-one conversion is not possible due to the volume of behavioral changes introduced by Icinga 2’s architectural rewrite.

Command definitions, notifications, and object relationships often need to be rebuilt from scratch.

For existing Nagios Core users, Nagios XI preserves your time, expertise, and historical configurations — ensuring the transition is fast and low-risk.*

*Some custom configurations in Nagios Core may not fully migrate automatically and could require manual adjustments.

Up and Running in Minutes

One of the clearest advantages in the Nagios XI vs Icinga 2 comparison is deployment speed. Nagios XI is designed so your team can go from download to monitoring in under 20 minutes. Whether you’re building your own Linux machine or prefer one of Nagios’s prebuilt VM options for quick and simple installation, Nagios has you covered. Minimal Linux knowledge is required, and customers consistently describe it as easy to deploy with monitoring live within the hour.

For a visual walkthrough, see our Four Simple Methods of Installing Nagios XI video.

Icinga 2 requires multiple separate components for full functionality — a core engine, database backend, web interface, and additional configuration modules — each needing its own initialization and setup.

For most teams, this means several hours to a full day before monitoring is live, with additional integrations like InfluxDB and Grafana potentially pushing that timeline further.

Nagios XI gets you to ROI faster, with less risk and no lengthy setup delays.

Scale on Your Terms

Nagios XI scales from small deployments to monitoring hundreds of thousands of devices. Large-scale environments benefit from Nagios Fusion, our licensed solution that provides a centralized view across multiple Nagios XI or Core servers.

Nagios Fusion also integrates with Nagios Network Analyzer (network traffic) and Nagios Log Server (centralized logs), enabling multi-site deployments, high availability, and aggregated visibility of data from across geographically dispersed infrastructures.

For high-volume active checks, nagios‑mod‑gearman distributes check execution across multiple workers, improving throughput and performance.

Combined, these integrations allow organizations to consolidate performance, network, and log data into a single view — improving operational insight without added complexity.

With Nagios XI, you add capability as you need it — Fusion for multi-site visibility, nagios-mod-gearman for high-volume check distribution — keeping your environment as simple or as powerful as the moment requires.

Start small, scale on demand, and maintain full visibility and uptime every step of the way.

Configuration Philosophy: GUI‑First vs Code‑First

Nagios XI: GUI-First, Configuration Wizard-Driven

Nagios XI prioritizes a GUI-first approach with 90+ Configuration Wizards for common monitoring scenarios. Administrators can define hosts, services, and checks without writing text-based configurations.

The Core Configuration Manager (CCM) provides fine-grained control of your monitoring configs through an advanced GUI — ideal for teams preferring point-and-click workflows and lowering the barrier to entry for those without deep Linux expertise, while still supporting advanced customization when needed.

For more information, take a look at Nagios XI’s web architecture.

Icinga 2: Code-First with DSL and Optional GUI

Icinga 2 centers on a code-first approach using its domain-specific language (DSL), which supports variables, conditionals, loops, and functions — enabling automation and integration with tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Terraform. A GUI configuration option exists, but changes are ultimately translated into DSL code.

This approach is best suited for teams with strong Linux skills and established automation workflows.

For teams that want to get monitoring running quickly without deep scripting knowledge, Nagios XI’s wizard-driven approach delivers immediate value — with full flexibility available when you need it.

Try Nagios XI for Yourself

The Nagios XI vs Icinga 2 decision ultimately comes down to what your team needs today and how you plan to grow. Nagios XI delivers enterprise-grade monitoring with faster deployment, predictable costs, and the support structure production environments demand.

• Start a free 30-day trial – Full enterprise features, no credit card required.
• Calculate your Nagios XI plan – Estimates for your environment.
• Request A Demo – Explore XI in action.

Network Analyzer 2026 is a whole new world of network visibility and security, combining traditional flow data capabilities with easy onboarding and baked-in integration interfaces for three best-in-class open-source network security tools. And to ice the cake, all of this now lives in a crisp, modern UI. Let’s dig in!

User Interface Re-Imagined

Before we explore the new integrations, let’s take a look at the new NNA interface. Coded from scratch by the Nagios development team, the updated UI provides a completely overhauled and optimized user experience and is available in both dark and light theme options.

New Dashboards and Reports

Nagios Network Analyzer now includes customizable per-user dashboards so that each user can quickly view the data that is most important to them. If you’re familiar with Nagios Log Server 2026 or with Nagios XI’s new Smart Dashboards, you’ll be right at home as you resize and arrange your custom panels to meet your needs.

And, once you’ve fine-tuned a dashboard, you can download it on-demand or schedule it for automatic email delivery as a PDF or JPG report.

New Home Page

The updated Home page provides an at-a-glance view of flow source traffic and data from integrated tools, including total Nmap scans over the last week, Suricata alerts, and Wireshark captures.

All the Integrations

Nagios Network Analyzer 2026 includes robust integration with the powerful network security tools Suricata, Wireshark, and Nmap. Initial setup instructions are included right in the user interface; simply copy the listed commands, paste the batch into the terminal of your NNA server, and hit Enter to load them up. Once they’re installed, built-in user interfaces enable you to leverage the capabilities of the tools to do things like running live interface and network composition scans, inspecting packets, alerting on Suricata Signature IDs (SIDs), and much more.

Suricata

The Suricata integration provides easy access to many great capabilities, such as

• Running live interface scans on-demand to look for issues.
• Managing Suricata Rulesets and individual Rules (26 open-source and commercial Rulesets pre-loaded).
• Viewing Alerts based on your Rules and alerting on Suricata SIDs.
• Run Whois, Reverse DNS, and Nmap scans of source and destination IPs in Suricata events.

This article is a great resource if you want to learn more about Suricata itself:

Suricata Deep Dive

This document will help you learn how to use Suricata in NNA:

Using Suricata with NNA

Wireshark

The Wireshark interface enables many useful capabilities, including:

• Running live captures on demand.
• Individual packet inspection in summary, detailed, and raw JSON views.
• Sending PCAP files generated by scans to Suricata for further analysis.

This deep dive article is a great way to learn more about the Wireshark project:

Wireshark Deep Dive

This document will teach you how to use Wireshark with NNA:

Using Wireshark with NNA

Nmap

The robust Nmap integration provides many useful functions:

• Run live on-demand Nmap scans of your network.
• Schedule recurring scans.
• Compare previously run scans with Ndiffs.
• Use the build-in scan Profiles for quick access to common settings and create your own.
• Alerting on the number of open/closed ports found in scheduled scans.
• Search Suricata for results found in scans.

If you want to dig into Nmap, this article is a great starting point:

Nmap Deep Dive

You can learn how to use Nmap with NNA here:

Using Nmap with NNA

Roles

With great power comes great responsibility, and since Nagios Network Analyzer 2026 has the potential to unlock so many powerful capabilities on your network, we’ve added a new Roles feature that gives you granular control over what your users can see and do.

Flow Source, Wireshark, Nmap, and Suricata feature access can be fine-tuned to fit any type of user, and these settings can be saved as Roles that can be quickly applied to new and existing users as needed.

Migration Options

Although a direct upgrade is not possible, we’ve developed and documented a straightforward migration path to go from Nagios Network Analyzer 2024 to 2026, including a special tool for migrating historical flow data that you chose to store in custom data directories:

Resources

The free trial version is a great way to explore the power of Nagios Network Analyzer 2026:

Network Analyzer Free Trial Download

The Admin Guide is an excellent resource to help you locate the documentation you need to get things going:

Network Analyzer Admin Guide

This webinar is a great way to see Network Analyzer 2026 in action:

Webinar: What’s New in Network Analyzer 2026

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to sales@nagios.com so we can assist you further.

Centralized User Management

Fusion has always provided a lot of value by enabling users to visualize status data from across their distributed Nagios deployments. It’s already a must-have for distributed environments and users who employ multiple Nagios Monitoring Solutions. Namely, Fusion’s ability to aggregate data from Nagios XI, Nagios Core, Nagios Log Server, and Nagios Network Analyzer systems and display it in custom dashboards and tactical displays. But one area of untapped potential has always been in serving as a platform for centralized management of other Nagios systems.

No longer is that the case! New in 2026R1 is the ability to copy users from one fused Nagios XI system to others with a few clicks, using the new Centralized Management menu. Although a humble first step, this new feature lays the foundation that will be used going forward to enable many more management capabilities in the future.

Learn more about using the Centralized User Management function:

Managing Nagios XI Users with Nagios Fusion

As an added bonus, this addition also necessitated adding a new update users’ endpoint (PUT/system/user) to the Nagios XI API, so both solutions were enhanced in the process.

System Profile

You’ll also notice a new System Profile menu, which can be used to generate and download a profile with a single click. The System Profile zip contains a wealth of data about your setup and serves as an invaluable resource for troubleshooting and support.

Fixes

Several issues were also resolved in this release to make Fusion more stable and reliable:

• Server polling interval is now being updated properly.
• The Administrator and User Guides are now being displayed correctly.
• The ssl_hostname_verify parameter is now being passed when adding a server via the API.
• Users located in AD groups will now show up in the “Add User from AD/LDAP” page.

Learn More

This article is a great resource for learning more about all of the capabilities:

If you’re not currently using Nagios Fusion and would like to take it for a spin, you can find the free, fully functional trial options:

The Admin Guide is another excellent resource for learning how to manage and get the most out of all of the capabilities:

In this article, we’ll highlight the biggest changes and provide links to resources so you can start exploring the new functionality right away.

New Simple Search Homepage

At the heart of Log Server 2026 is the completely brand-new Simple Search homepage.
This streamlined interface is built for quick, everyday investigation, making it easier for users of all experience levels to search for common log events and gain powerful insights without the clutter.

OpenSearch 2 → 3 Upgrade

Under the hood, Nagios Log Server 2026 upgrades its core components from OpenSearch 2.x to 3.1.0 and Logstash 9.1.1, increasing performance, stability, and scalability.

Quality of Life & UX Enhancements

The 2026 release introduces a number of subtle but meaningful refinements that improve everyday usability:

• “Add Log Source” (+) button consolidates source setup actions into one central place.
• Timestamp localization adapts automatically to your region and time zone.
• Improved LDAP/AD editing page for simpler authentication configuration.
• Role assignment per cluster instance for better administrative control of the jobs each instance executes.

All of these updates contribute to a more cohesive, accessible, and responsive Log Server experience.

Changelog

For a detailed list of fixes and developer notes, visit the full changelog below:

Getting Started

If you’re new to Nagios Log Server or ready to upgrade to the 2026 release, download the trial version here:

Analyzing Logs in Nagios Log Server

For a complete walkthrough on using queries, filters, dashboards, and how to manage your home page mode to analyze logs effectively, check out this guide:

In this article, we’ll highlight the most impactful changes and provide helpful links to documentation so you can start exploring the new functionality right away. Let’s take a look!

Home Screen

The main Nagios XI home screen received several visual and functional improvements in the 2026 release, making it more than just a landing page—it’s now a true hub for navigation and monitoring. One of the most noticeable additions is the new Host Treemap, which provides a quick, color-coded overview of each host and its associated services. This intuitive, space-efficient dashlet makes it easier than ever to identify problem areas at a glance and monitor overall infrastructure health right from the dashboard.

In addition to visual updates, the homepage now includes helpful tabs: Getting Started, Admin, and Popular Wizards. These sections offer quick links to common tasks and important areas of Nagios, allowing new and experienced users alike to navigate more efficiently. Whether you’re setting up your first checks, managing users, or launching new Configuration Wizards, the updated homepage gets you there faster.

Customize the Landing Page in Nagios XI 2026

Smart Dashboards

A major highlight of XI 2026 is the introduction of Smart Dashboards—a next-generation dashboarding system built for flexibility, interactivity, and ease of use.

The Add Dashlet interface makes building Smart Dashboards faster and more intuitive. Dashlets are now organized by type with clear labels. Whether you’re dropping in graphs, gauges, statistics, or external content, the streamlined experience makes it easy to customize your dashboard with just a few clicks.

How To Use Dashboards in Nagios XI 2026

New and Improved Dashlets:

---

Graph Dashlet

Bar Chart Dashlet

Gauge Dashlet

Pie Chart Dashlet

Statistic Dashlet

Text Dashlet

Treemap Dashlet

URL Dashlet

Alert Heatmap Dashlet

In addition to new dashlets, this release introduces:

• A Global dashboard Setting, for team-wide Smart dashboards.
• Ability to customize dashboard icons and icon colors in the Neptune Theme.
• Updated Dashboards menu to support both Smart and Legacy Dashboards across Modern and Neptune Themes.
• Dashboard Wizards for both Smart and Legacy dashboards.

Quickly create and customize dashboards with the Dashboard Wizard—supporting both Smart and Legacy dashboards for a faster, more streamlined setup experience.

Added Google.com as default host

To help users get started with monitoring right out of the box, Google.com has been added as a default host in Nagios XI 2026. This provides an immediate example of website host and service monitoring in action, making it easier for beginner users to see how checks are configured and displayed—no setup required.

New Monitoring Wizards

Nagios XI 2026 continues to expand monitoring capabilities with a brand-new wizard:

• Meraki Switch Wizard – Quickly set up monitoring for Cisco Meraki Switches.

How To Monitor Meraki Switches With Nagios XI 2026

Quality of Life Improvements

• A new Getting Started notification welcomes new users with a link to documentation.
• New default host: Google.
• New default hostgroups: Websites, Switches.
• New default servicegroups: Web Services, SSL Certificates.
• Added support for experimental features toggle in Admin settings.
• Added a Re-run job feature to the SNMP Walk Jobs page.
• Improved app-wide error handling and logging.

Optional Statistics Tracking

XI 2026 introduces optional usage statistics tracking (opt-in/out) to help the Nagios Team better understand how the software is used, so future versions can be even more user-friendly.

Changelog

To review all the changes in detail, including security fixes and development notes, visit the full changelog here:

Nagios XI Changelog

Getting Started

If you’re new to Nagios XI or ready to upgrade to the 2026 release, download the trial version here:

Nagios XI Downloads

Another great resource is this article, which provides tips and resources on how to quickly get started using Nagios XI:

Quick Start Guide (Modern Theme)

If you’d like a personalized walkthrough of Nagios XI 2026 tailored to your specific environment, or a hands-on remote session with one of our technicians to help you get started, we’d love to offer you a Quickstart session or free Demo.

To schedule your session—or for any other assistance—just email us at sales@nagios.com. Our sales and technical teams are here to help you get the most out of your Nagios XI 2026 trial and ensure you’re set up for success!

A popular request from our users has been for a Kubernetes monitoring method, and in Nagios XI 2024R2, we were pleased to add a brand-new Premium wizard, available as long as you have active Maintenance benefits. In this article, we’ll discuss initial setup, outline the capabilities of the wizard, and provide links to the full technical documentation you can follow to start monitoring Kubernetes with Nagios XI right away.

How it Works and Initial Setup

K8s/K3s monitoring with Nagios XI is accomplished using the Nagios Cross Platform Agent (NCPA), installed on the control-plane/master node. A special check_kubernetes.sh plugin is used to fetch data, and you can choose between multiple methods of allowing NCPA to connect, including a service account and kubectl.

You can follow this guide to complete the necessary initial setup steps:

Setting Up Kubernetes Monitoring with NCPA

Discover the Wizard

Once you’ve got the initial setup taken care of, you can then head to Configure > Configuration Wizards and find the Kubernetes with NCPA Wizard. The step-by-step wizard enables you to quickly configure monitoring of a variety of meaningful metrics, including:

• Nodes Active
• Daemon Sets
• Deployments
• Jobs Failed
• Pod Restarts
• Replica Sets
• Stateful Sets
• TLS
• PVC (Persistent Volume Claims)
• Unbound PVS (Unbound Persistent Volumes)

Here’s a look at some K8s metrics being actively monitored after running the wizard:

You can find complete details on using the wizard in this guide:

Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters with Nagios XI and NCPA

The Docker Wizard

Since K8s is often used to orchestrate Docker, we’ll also mention the Docker Wizard (another Premium feature), which provides a way to monitor your containers. Available metrics include existing containers, running containers, healthy containers, CPU usage, and Memory usage. Checks can be executed either via NCPA or the cURL API. You can learn more about Docker monitoring here:

How to Easily Monitor Docker Containers with Nagios XI

Nagios XI Business Process Intelligence (BPI)

Also worth mentioning is BPI, which provides a way for you to combine hosts and services you monitor into logical groups and then alert intelligently based on both the overall percent health of the group and of ‘essential members’ (which must be in an OK state for the group to function). BPI is of great value when monitoring clustered applications.

What’s New in 2024R2

If you’d like to find out more about the other great features we added in XI 2024R2, including SSO, the Zabbix Agent Wizard, and more, check out this article:

New Monitoring Wizards

Three great new wizards join the ranks in XI 2024R2: Kubernetes, Zabbix Agent, and the Generic Plugin Wizard. We’ve also updated the NSClient++ Wizard.

Kubernetes with NCPA

This Premium wizard enables you to monitor Kubernetes clusters via the NCPA agent. Available metrics include Nodes Active, Daemon Sets, Deployments, Jobs Failed, Pod Restarts, Replica Sets, Stateful Sets, TLS, PVC, and Unbound PVS. You can learn more about the initial setup here:

Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters with Nagios XI and NCPA

Zabbix Agent

With the new Zabbix Agent Wizard, one of XI 2024R2’s Premium features, you’ll be able to leverage your existing Windows and Linux Zabbix agents to set up comprehensive monitoring in Nagios XI:

Monitoring Zabbix Agents with Nagios XI

Generic Plugin Wizard

The new Generic Plugin Wizard provides a quick way to set up monitoring using custom plugins. This enables you to create a command to execute your custom plugins, and setup a Nagios check for it without the need to go to the Core Config Manager.

This document provides step-by-step details on using the wizard:

Using the Generic Plugin Wizard in Nagios XI

NSClient++ Wizard

Also worth mentioning is that we added support for check_nrpe to the NSClient++ Wizard and updated its status from Legacy, making it once again a current wizard.

SSO

A big request we’ve seen over time from our users is an SSO option, and we’re excited to introduce Single Sign-on via Microsoft Azure Active Directory in 2024R2. You can access this feature in Admin > External Sign-On(SSO) menu and can learn more about setting it up here:

Configuring SSO in Nagios XI 2024R2

NagVis Enhancements:

• Most Map elements now have relative positioning
• The Edit Map menu can now be accessed with a right-click
• Added missing support in NagVis for Nagios custom variables with an NDO backend

Nagios Core Updated

The Nagios Core engine at the heart of Nagios XI has been updated to 4.5.9.

NCPA v3 Support for Deploy Agent

The Auto Deployment feature, which enables you to push NCPA (the Nagios Cross Platform Agent) to remote hosts right from the Nagios XI UI, previously only supported NCPA v2, an older version of the agent. Now you can also deploy NCPA v3, the latest version, with the tool. This enables you to take advantage of all of the updates that went into v3, while still leveraging the convenience and centralized control of Auto Deployment.

Introducing Premium

In Nagios XI 2024R2, we’re introducing a new Premium Features model. Premium Features are a benefit of active license Maintenance. To ensure continued access to these features, we suggest you renew your Nagios XI license annually. In the event that your license expires, simply renew your license, and the full list of Premium Features will regain functionality automatically. The Premium features include:

• Single Sign-On (SSO) via MS Azure AD
• The Remote Workers Nagios Mod-Gearman management interface
• Premium Wizards
  • Prometheus
  • vSphere
  • Oracle Tablespace, Serverspace, and Query
  • MSSQL Server, Database, and Query
  • Kubernetes
  • HyperV
  • Docker
  • Cloud VM (DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Linode, Azure, and Rackspace)
  • Amazon EC2 and S3
  • Zabbix Agent
  • OpenAI Usage

Changelog

You can find the full Changelog here if you’d like to review all the changes, including details on bug fixes and security patches:

Nagios XI Changelog

Getting Started

If you’re new to Nagios XI and want to take 2024R2 for a spin, you’ll find the free, fully functional trial version here:

Nagios XI Downloads

Another great resource is this article, which provides tips and resources to help you make the most of your free trial:

If you’d like a guided personal tour of XI geared toward your unique requirements or a hands-on remote session with one of our techs to help you get a few things set up, we’d love to offer you a free Demo or Quickstart. To set this up, or for any other help you may need, feel free to email sales@nagios.com so we can give you a hand. Our sales and technical teams will do all they can to help you maximize your free trial!

SNMP capabilities are ubiquitous across the critical elements of your deployment, and the protocol quantifies countless metrics that can be monitored to keep an eye on the status and performance of both legacy and modern equipment in your infrastructure.

Active SNMP checks, where Nagios XI polls OIDs (Object IDs) for data, tend to be fairly accessible, especially using built-in tools like the Network Switch and Router Wizard. But what about SNMP traps? As powerful as this passive approach to SNMP monitoring is, providing rapid results when events occur, traps can be difficult to configure for monitoring. That’s where NXTI (the Nagios XI SNMP Trap Interface) comes in.

Without NXTI

On the plus side, Nagios XI is fully capable of monitoring, alerting, and reporting on SNMP traps even in the Standard edition. However, trap definitions are handled on the command line with flat text files, which adds an additional layer of complexity to an already complicated monitoring method. If you’re a command line wiz and know traps well, this may not be a roadblock, but for everyone else the value of NXTI is huge, making trap monitoring more accessible.

The NXTI Advantage

NXTI provides a way to manage your trap settings right from the Nagios XI GUI, enabling you to:

• View, Add, Edit, Copy, Delete, and Disable trap definitions.
• Configure passive checks based on traps.
• View and Delete received trap logs.
• Search and sort both trap definitions and received trap logs.
• Monitor the snmptt process.
• Locally test snmptrapd/snmptt functionality.

Quite simply, NXTI helps you go from this:

To this:

Note that in order to monitor incoming traps that match your trap definition, you’ll need to check the Enable Passive Service Setup checkbox.

You can then run the SNMP Trap Wizard to begin monitoring the traps. If for some reason you do not see status results in the SNMP trap service you set up for traps you’ve received, check in Admin > Monitoring Config > Unconfigured Objects, in case there is a mismatch between the IP/FQDN you set in Nagios for the target host and the IP/FQDN contained in the trap.

The Advanced Section

The Advanced tab of NXTI (at the top right of the NXTI menu) provides a variety of useful functions, including the ability to add an example trap definition, to send a test trap, and even to send a custom test trap for more specific testing of trap features and functions. It also provides a way to view the Unknown Trap Log, which lists any traps XI receives that don’t have a matching trap definition.

To learn more about managing SNMP traps with NXTI, you can refer to the complete guide:

SNMP Traps with NXTI in Nagios XI

If you’d like to learn more about everything SNMP, this excellent video series is a great resource:

Nagios XI SNMP Monitoring Series

The resources on managing MIBs (SNMP Management Information Bases) may come in handy as well:

Nagios XI MIBs Architecture

Finally, you can dig into the entire set of Enterprise Edition features here:

Setting up Your Apache Dashboard

Start Collecting Data

First off, you’ll need to set up your Apache webserver to send its logs upstream to your Log Server cluster. Simply click the green + Add Log Source button at the top of the interface and follow the instructions in the Apache Server section.

Build a Foundation and Save It

Once you have data coming in, navigate to Dashboards and select the built-in Nagios Log Server Search dashboard. Before making any changes, select Save as from the top menu and save the dashboard under a new name like Apache Dashboard, choosing either to save it as a personal dashboard (only visible to your login) or Global (visible to all Users).

Another approach would be to start with the built-in Empty Dashboard, but since Log Server Search already has an Events Over Time histogram panel and an All Events table, both of which we’ll want in our Apache dashboard, it saves time to start with it instead.

It’s also worth saving your Dashboard regularly as you build it, so you don’t lose any of your work if you bounce to another section of the interface accidentally.

Narrow the Field

Before we add panels, let’s narrow our results a bit to just focus on Apache logs. To do so, we’ll add two queries:

type: apache_access

type: apache_error

If there are other things you might like to see reflected in your Events Over Time histogram, you can add them as well. Things like the following simple queries might be worth paying attention to:

http.response.status_code:403

http.response.status_code:404

You can also simply click the 404 and 500 default query templates to load detailed queries focusing on those response codes and to use as a reference for creating your own more complex queries.

One advantage of combining multiple smaller queries is that the color you select for each query will appear in the Events Over Time panel, giving you quick visual insight into the volume of results reflecting each query:

Add Your Custom Panels

Now that we’ve created a basic dashboard and narrowed down the data set to relevant logs, it’s time to add a few key panels to our Apache Dashboard.

To add a panel, click the + sign on the upper right, at the top of the Row.

Note that when your new Panel populates to the dashboard, it will appear at the bottom of the Row, below the All Events table. Simply click the top of any Panel you wish to move and drag it to where you want to place it, and resize Panels as needed by clicking and dragging from the bottom-right or bottom-left corner.

The following three options are a great start for Apache data analysis:

http Response Codes

This panel will show you the http response codes generated by your webserver, helping you quickly identify things like broken pages (404 codes), visitors attempting to access unauthorized resources (403 codes), and webserver-side issues with completing requests (500 codes).

Field: http.response.status_code

Apache Hits

This panel will provide insight into the top IP addresses of visitors to your site. You can adjust the ‘Count’ field in the Edit Panel form to show more or less IPs.

Field: source.address

Top URLs

This panel will enable you to see the top URLs visited on your site, providing insight into everything from user behavior to code injection attempts.

Field: url.original

Add a Map

Another awesome panel for Apache data is the Map panel, which enables you to leverage geoip data in your Apache logs to visualize where hits are coming from geographically.

Field: source.geo.location

The Final Dashboard

With those panels added and customized, you now have a great Apache Dashboard to reference anytime you want to dig into the details.

You may also wish to get proactive alerts when certain events are collected, such as 404 response codes. You can learn more about turning queries into alerts in the following guide:

Alerting on Log Events with Nagios Log Server

You can learn more about creating and managing Dashboards and Queries here:

Analyzing Logs with Nagios Log Server R2

Finally, this article highlights all of the updates and enhancements in Nagios Log Server R2 in case you’re new to Log Server or are still running version 2024R1:

In this article we’ll discuss Custom Includes, a way to fine-tune and personalize your experience in the XI user interface (UI).

How to Use Custom Includes

To access the component, navigate to Admin > System Extensions > Custom Includes.

Here you can upload CSS, Javascript, and image files, and once uploaded, select which you want to activate to modify the user interface.

As a simple example, let’s change the header and footer to a new gradient. First, we’ll verify the name of the objects we want to modify by right-clicking them and choosing Inspect in our browser:

Now that we’ve determined the object names, we’ll take the easy route and generate some custom CSS gradient code using a free web generator like https://cssgradient.io/. Finally, we’ll create two files in a text editor and save them as .css.

Header-Gradient-Blue.css

#header {
    background: #020024;
    background: linear-gradient(90deg,rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 35%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

Footer-Gradient-Blue.css

#footer {
    background: #020024;
    background: linear-gradient(90deg,rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 35%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

Now we’ll upload the files in the Custom Includes menu, click their checkboxes, and click Save Changes. Once you refresh your browser or bounce to a new menu, you’ll see the style change:

We could take the customization further by customizing objects like leftnav, and the mid-menu section titles. Regarding section titles, they do take a bit more work since each is an individual object. For example, to customize the section titles in the Home menu, we’d load a .css file with the following:

#mid-menu-home-section-favorites {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

#mid-menu-home-section-quickview {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

#mid-menu-home-section-details {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

#mid-menu-home-section-graphs {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

#mid-menu-home-section-maps {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

#mid-menu-home-section-incident-management {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

#mid-menu-home-section-monitoringprocess {   
	background: #020024;
	background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(2, 0, 36, 1) 0%, rgba(9, 9, 121, 1) 91%, rgba(0, 212, 255, 1) 100%);
}

Here’s a look at the Home menu with the above CSS loaded, as well as a new file to modify leftnav to match the gradient we chose for our header and footer:

Note that the Neptune theme won’t be impacted by CSS changes made to Custom Includes. For best results, customize the Modern Dark and Modern Light themes.

You can also incorporate images into your customization, as detailed toward the end of this guide:

Using Custom Includes in Nagios XI

To return the UI to its default look, simply uncheck your custom files in the Custom Includes settings and save your changes.

How to Use the Custom Logo Component

You may also wish to add your own company logo to the upper left of the Nagios XI UI, which can be done easily with the Custom Logo Component found in Admin > System Extensions > Components > Custom Logo.

You’ll need to copy whichever file you wish to use as your new logo to /usr/local/nagiosxi/html/images on your Nagios XI server and make sure it’s 100px X 42px. Also make sure that you click the Enable Custom Logo checkbox once your settings are updated to activate the change.

In this example we’re having a little fun with the feature, but for practical uses it’s a great way to brand the UI and make your users feel at home by using your company or department’s official logo.

Note that in the Custom Logo menu you can also change the Target URL for the logo to any URL you’d like.

If you aren’t already using Nagios XI and would like to try out these features, we offer a free trial version you can take for a spin:

Nagios XI Free Trial Download

We’d also be happy to offer you a custom Demo session if you want a guided tour of our solutions or a free Quickstart remote session with a sales engineer to help you get a few things set up. You can email sales@nagios.com for details on setting up either option.