Use Nagios XI Graphs to Illuminate Your Infrastructure
Nagios XI includes a wide variety of graphs to help you visualize your performance data from many different perspectives, including in comparison with other services, different periods of time, and even in light of projected future usage. In this article, we’ll dig into the whole illuminating collection.
Home > Performance Graphs
First, let’s look at the regular Performance Graphs. Here you can easily view graphs of the individual services on a single host, the ping checks on all of the hosts in a hostgroup, or all of the services in a servicegroup. At the top of the menu, you’ll see the Time Period and object selection settings.
To the right of each graph, you’ll see a hamburger menu you can click to choose an export option, and buttons to view the raw data, or view the object status, notifications, and history.
Exploring the Graph Explorer
This powerful tool can be found at Home > Graphs > Graph Explorer.
- Top Alerts, Host Health, Service Health
The options begin humbly in the first three tabs with a simple bar chart showing Top Alerts, a Host Health pie chart, and a Service Health pie chart. Of important note is the Dashify icon, which you’ll notice throughout the XI interface. Simply click it to add whichever visualization you see above to a Dashboard:
- Scalable Performance Graph
This simple tool provides a way to quickly create a graph for a single service, for a set period of time.
- Time Stacked Performance Graphs
Time Stacked graphs have tremendous value, providing you with an easy way to stack resource usage of a service over chunks of time on a single graph. This enables you to quickly spot certain times of the day or week that usage tends to be high, as well as anomalies to investigate further.
- Multistacked Performance Graphs
Multistacked graphing is one of the most powerful graphing features in Nagios XI, enabling you to combine any and as many services as you’d like onto a single graph for quick comparison and insight into the performance of many objects at once. One example of its use would be to visualize memory usage on several hosts in one place. Also note the Graph Options dropdown at the bottom of the graph options, which enables you to choose between area stacked (as shown below), area, line, and spline Line Type:
Metrics
Metrics is an excellent tool and is often overlooked. It provides a way to visualize current and historical performance filtered by categories, including Disk Usage, CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Load, and Swap.
Though not a graph, the Gauges tab is worth a mention, providing compact bar dashlets representing the percent usage of services, including colored lines representing their warning and critical thresholds:
Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is an Enterprise Edition favorite that enables you to project future usage based on the historical performance data collected by Nagios XI. Using this tool, you’ll be able to get ahead of resource overload by allocating additional storage and power to your machines before they need it.
Network Analyzer Traffic Analysis Tab
If you’re using Nagios Network Analyzer alongside XI for flow analysis, you’ll also notice an extra tab in your Host Detail pages labelled Network Traffic Analysis that will help you visualize what IPs the host is communicating with in a sharp-looking chord diagram.
Monitoring Engine Event Queue
This handy graph, found at Home >Monitoring Process > Process Info, provides insight into how busy the Nagios Core engine is currently, and over the upcoming 5 minutes.
To learn more about monitoring your monitoring servers, take a look at this article:
Monitor of Monitors: Easily Monitoring Nagios Servers
The Law of Averages
By default, Nagios XI will store your performance data in a Round Robyn Database for four years. The most recent data has the most granularity, while older data is averaged. This function significantly reduces the storage required to house your historical performance data. The general schedule as data ages is:
- 0 to 48 hours: 1-minute increments
- 48 hours to 10 days: 5-minute average
- 11 to 90 days: 30-minute average
- 92 days to 4 years: 6-hour average
If you’d like to dig further into the RRD file averaging function, this Knowledgebase article is a great resource:
Nagios XI: Performance Data Averaging
To learn more about using and managing graphs in Nagios XI, you can review this document:
Generating Graphs with Nagios XI 2024
And, if you aren’t using Nagios XI yet and would like to try out all of the features, you can find the free, fully functional trial here:
