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Fuse This! Use Nagios Fusion for Comprehensive Vigilance

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Picture of Shamas Demoret
Shamas Demoret
Technical Content Manager
Screenshot of technical summary in Nagios Fusion

Nagios XI, our monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting solution, is an excellent value for environments both large and small. In larger environments where multiple monitoring servers may be required, Nagios Fusion provides immense value. If your IT infrastructure contains a few hundred hosts, a single XI monitoring server may be all you need to cover your requirement. As scale increases, it becomes necessary to split your monitoring between multiple XI servers. Nagios Fusion is here to help, providing you with a single pane of glass where you can view status information from across your Nagios monitoring servers.

Fusion can also be of great value in geographically dispersed infrastructures. You can deploy a local Nagios XI server at each location, then use Fusion for consolidated insight into important events. Fusion’s design makes it one of the easiest possible methods for achieving distributed monitoring in both cases of large scale and geographic separation.

Distributed Monitoring Made Easy

Nagios Fusion reaches out to your Nagios XI servers on a customizable interval (by default every 5 minutes) to collect status data from them. The connection is via HTTP/HTTPS, saving you the trouble of setting up dedicated links or firewall rules, and simplifying setup. Fusion can also poll data on Nagios Log Server and Nagios Network Analyzer servers, providing a single pane of glass where you can view data collected by the whole Nagios Suite. Fusion also works with Nagios Core servers running version 4.0.7+.

Adding Nagios servers to your Fusion install is a quick and easy process, and once added the data from your fused servers can be viewed in custom Dashboards, rotating Views, and several built-in tactical displays.

Built-in Tactical Displays

One of many great things about Nagios Fusion is it provides value the moment you begin to fuse your Nagios servers, thanks to the built-in tactical displays. Let’s take a look at a couple of those options:

The Network Operations Center display provides an overview of open (aka unhandled) host and service problems which have not yet been acknowledged by an admin:

The Nagios Fusion Network Operations Center status page.
The built-in Network Operations Center status page.

The Tactical Overview shows consolidated tables reflecting how many items are in various states overall and individually on each fused Nagios server:

The Nagios Fusion Tactical Overview display
The built-in Tactical Overview status display.

As is the case with many of the dashlets we’ll discuss next, the above tactical displays aren’t just a visual aid; with a single click you’ll be viewing status detail pages and pre-filtered lists of objects in certain states directly in the web UI of your individual Nagios XI servers.

Customizable Insight with Fusion Dashboards

Nagios Fusion makes creating custom Dashboards quick and easy, and includes 30 unique dashlets displaying many types of data in a variety of ways, such as:

  • Hostgroup and Servicegroup Status
  • Open Host and Service Problems
  • Recent Alerts
  • Tactical Summary
  • Nagios XI BPI Status
  • Log Server Alerts
  • Log Server Cluster Status
  • Network Analyzer Alerts
  • Network Analyzer Bandwidth Graphs

Dashlets can be colored and sized however you wish, and Dashboards you create can be deployed to other users who might find them useful to save time and maximize impact.

Let’s take a quick look at a couple of custom dashboards:

This example shows performance graphs for memory and drivespace on Windows and Linux servers, along with Tactical Summary and Open Problems dashlets:

A Nagios Fusion dashboard showing various performance graphs.
Performance graphs and tactical summaries on a Nagios Fusion Dashboard.

In our second Dashboard, we have data on the health of our Fusion server itself, Host Health and Service Health summary dashlets, a Network Analyzer bandwidth graph, a Top alerts dashlet, and a Nagios XI BPI (Business Process Intelligence) group status dashlet:

A Nagios Fusion Dashboard showing various alert and status dashlets and graphs.
A custom Fusion dashboard showing data from Nagios XI, Log Server, and Network Analyzer.

Your handcrafted dashboards can also be added to your Views, enabling you to rotate through them (along with various built-in tactical displays and even custom URLs) at a configurable speed. Views are an excellent option for creating dynamic NOC screens.

Multi-Tenancy Made Easy

Another great aspect of Fusion is the robust multi-tenancy, which enables you to fine-tune what each of your Fusion users has visibility of and access to. You can determine which fused servers are visible, and map your Fusion users to existing Nagios XI users on a per-server basis:

The User Mapping section of the Nagios Log Server Create User Menu.
User Mapping settings in Nagios Fusion.

Once mapped, the Fusion user’s visibility and click-through access will be limited to the hosts and services you’ve already given them permission to view in Nagios XI, saving you time and ensuring a consistent user experience and access control across your deployment.

If you have a large environment, or an infrastructure spanning multiple locations or regions, Fusion will prove to be a valuable asset. The free 30 day trial is a great way to get started and see everything Fusion has to offer.