Nagios XI Enterprise Edition: 10 Great Features

Most of Nagios XI’s capabilities are included with the Standard Edition, providing you with a robust monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting solution for your infrastructure. However, the optional Enterprise Edition unlocks a set of powerful additional features that are sure to prove their worth in your environment.

Audit Log

The Audit Log provides easy access to details on interactions with the user interface, Core Config Manager, subsystems, API, Core engine, and other elements of the Nagios XI application. Results can be filtered by time, source, type, and user, and downloaded as a CSV or PDF file. You’ll also notice a Send to Nagios Log Server button, which makes forwarding these logs upstream to your Log Server setup a breeze.

BPI

Although BPI (Business Process Intelligence) is included in the Standard Edition, the Enterprise Edition adds the ability to automatically sync your hostgroups and servicegroups into BPI groups, providing a way to get further value out of time spent carefully cultivating your groups.

To learn more about using BPI, you can review the Using BPI guide.

You can find a detailed cluster monitoring with BPI use-case example here.

Bulk Modification and Bulk Renaming

The Bulk Modifications Tool has long been a favorite of Enterprise Edition users, especially those with large and dynamic environments. The tool enables you to quickly modify a key setting on as many hosts or services as you’d like with a few clicks.

Bulk Renaming not only provides a way to rename many objects at once, but even better (unlike renaming one-at-a-time in the Core Config Manager) ensures that your historical performance data is retained even after changing the name of an object.

Capacity Planning

Capacity Planning is another user favorite. This Enterprise Edition feature enables you to project future resource usage based on collected historical performance data. The projections can be viewed in graphs, added to dashboards, made into reports, and even monitored using the Capacity Planning Wizard. This will empower you to run maintenance on and allocate additional resources to your equipment before it becomes overloaded.

You can learn more about using Capacity Planning in Nagios XI 2024 here.

Deadpool

In dynamic environments, the Deadpool can be a major timesaver. This feature provides a way to automatically decommission hosts and services that have been in a problem state for a customizable amount of time. Stage 1 automatically stops notifications, then Stage 2 can be set to either delete (remove entirely) or deactivate (mark ‘inactive’, thus stopping the Core engine from monitoring but leaving the config in the Core Config Manager).

Full details on using the Deadpool can be found here.

Scheduled Pages and Reports

The Standard Edition already provides a lot of value by making emailing and downloading individual reports quick and easy, but have you ever dreamed of automating report delivery? With Scheduled Pages and Reports, you’ll be able to accomplish this with ease, setting XI to send key reports to teams and managers on whichever frequency you choose.

You can learn more about page and report scheduling options here.

SLA Report

Speaking of reports, the SLA Report is another great Enterprise Edition feature. Simply choose the time period to report on, narrow down the results to the specific hosts, services, or groups, and enter your SLA target for immediate insight into SLA status.

Full details on using the SLA Report can be found here.

Notification Management

For admins with large teams, the Notification Management feature can be a big timesaver. This tool provides a way to template notification messages, preferences, and time periods, then deploy them to many users at once.

SNMP Trap Interface (NXTI)

SNMP Traps are a powerful way to passively monitor a broad array of devices and applications, but can be challenging to integrate into your monitoring, especially from the command line. NXTI provides a GUI-driven option to help you leverage SNMP Traps with Nagios XI.

NXTI provides the following capabilities:

• View, Add, Edit, Copy, Delete, and Disable trap definitions.
• 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.

Full details on using NXTI can be found here.

Accessing Enterprise

The Enterprise Edition features directory can be found by simply clicking the Enterprise main menu in Nagios XI.

If you’re currently running the Standard Edition and would like to upgrade, simply email sales@nagios.com so our team can assist you. Once your license is upgraded, you’ll be able to add an additional key in the Admin > License Information menu to immediately activate the Enterprise features.