This video provides a guided walk-through covering each step of the BPI Wizard:

You can also refer to this documentation for full details:

Here is a direct link to the PDF as well:

How to Use the BPI Wizard in Nagios XI

Business process intelligence (BPI) is essential for organizations. It provides a holistic view of interconnected components within a system or value chain. Instead of monitoring individual servers or services in isolation, business process monitoring ties these elements together to evaluate the overall performance of critical workflows. This approach helps identify how issues in individual components affect the broader business operation.

For example, monitoring an online shopping cart or order process ensures that the entire chain—web server, application, database, and user transactions—is functioning correctly. If one element fails, it affects the customer experience and business revenue. For instance, if an item cannot be added to the shopping cart due to server issues, the potential sale is lost. Being able to monitor all these interconnected systems at once is incredibly helpful. It ensures that businesses can respond promptly, fix any issues, and maintain a seamless experience for their customers.

Getting Started with BPI in Nagios XI

Before using business process intelligence (BPI) in Nagios XI, ensure you have XI installed on your preferred computer.

If you’re unfamiliar with the installation process, don’t worry. We offer helpful guides to ensure a smooth installation:

• How To Install Nagios XI with VMware ESX vSphere: Access here
• How To Install Nagios XI with VMware Workstation Pro: Access here
• Installing Nagios XI with Hyper-V: Access here
• How To Install Nagios XI Manually on Linux: Access here

For additional help or information, see our Nagios XI Library section or visit Nagios Support.

Once installed, you will be able to access Nagios XI’s powerful monitoring tools, including BPI, which will provide you with a detailed view of your business processes.

How to Access BPI

To access BPI in Nagios XI, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Nagios XI
2. Click on the Enterprise icon
3. Open the Home dropdown menu
4. Click on BPI

Understanding the BPI Dashboard

The BPI dashboard is designed to help you organize your monitoring groups effectively. It categorizes items into different sections, making it easy to see how different components are performing. Here’s a breakdown of the categories on the BPI dashboard:

• All Priorities
• High Priority
• Medium Priority
• Low Priority
• Host Groups
• Service Groups

How to Create a New BPI Group

Here is how to make a BPI group:

1. At the top of the page, click Create New BPI Group
2. Enter the required details:
   • Group ID
   • Display Name
   • Group Description
   • Info URL

Setting Health Thresholds

Health thresholds help ensure that you are alerted when things go wrong:

• If the health threshold reaches 90%, you will receive a warning
• If it drops below 80%, you will get a critical notification
• The critical threshold must always be lower than the warning threshold

Assigning Priorities and Adding Users

Each group can be assigned a priority level. Choose from Low, Medium, or High priority based on the criticality of the group. You can also add advanced users who can view the group but do not have admin privileges

Adding Hosts, Services, and Groups

On the right-hand side of the BPI dashboard, you will find available:

• Hosts (marked with H)
• Services (marked with S)
• BPI Groups (marked with G)

To add a new host, service, or BPI group:

1. Select the desired item
2. Click Add Member
3. Click Write Configuration to save changes. The item will automatically be assigned a medium priority

Monitoring Group Health

The BPI dashboard provides an overview of group health and any existing problems. By clicking on the BPI name, you can access a dropdown menu showing the status of all hosts and services. You can check the health of hosts and services, which are categorized as:

• Up
• Warning
• Critical
• Down

Conclusion

BPI allows businesses to quickly identify issues and address them before they affect the customer experience or revenue. Whether you’re managing e-commerce operations, supply chains, or enterprise-level workflows, Nagios XI’s BPI maximizes business uptime and revenue, ensuring continuous operational success.

By following these steps, you can effectively use Nagios XI’s BPI feature for system monitoring and optimize your business processes. This integrated approach helps you improve efficiency, reduce downtime, and provide exceptional service. Happy monitoring!

Business Process Intelligence can be leveraged for a wide variety of group monitoring use cases and is especially useful when monitoring clusters and complex applications, where some members can fail without compromising the application functionality, while others may be essential.

Not only will unlocking the capabilities of this feature enable you to alert more intelligently, but it will also enhance your ability to troubleshoot issues and provide rapid root cause analysis when set up properly.

Nagios BPI Group Example

Let’s look at the group for a Nagios Log Server testing and development Cluster, running on a VMWare vWorker, as an excellent example of the power of BPI (note each Nagios license includes a free test/lab install, so you can test new configurations and upgrades before rolling them into production). In this example, we have assigned the group a low priority since it isn’t a production setup. We’ve also made the Windows Host on which VMWare is running an essential member (indicated by the dotted circle to its left), because if the VM Host stopped working, so would all of the Log Server Instances running as VM guests.

Nesting Groups for Holistic Monitoring

BPI includes the ability to nest groups within groups, so the status of multiple BPI groups impacts the status of the larger overarching group. This technique allows you to utilize multiple layers of group logic to determine the status of your ultimate top-level BPI group’s status. The Nagios Log Server Lab Environment group, as depicted above, consists of three additional groups, each reflecting the state of a Log Server Instance, and a fourth group, which represents the vWorker they operate on.

These smaller groups include a ping check for the Host, key performance checks like CPU and memory usage, and Service status checks for opensearch and logstash. We’ve marked the Host ping check and the opensearch/logstash Service checks as essential members since their failure would render this Instance non-functional:

Troubleshooting with Nagios BPI

If any of these essential members enter a problem state, the NLSR1-Test-A/B/C group they are in will show as critical.

Once this happens, the larger ‘Nagios Log Server Lab Environment’ group will go into a Warning state based on the group health thresholds we’ve defined:

With a quick look at the group members, we can immediately see the problem is with the opensearch Service on the third Instance, and can expand the group to see if there are any other problems:

All is Well Again

Since the stopped opensearch Service is the sole problem on Instance C, we SSH into the machine and restart it. After doing so, we schedule an immediate check for the Service on its Status Detail page and revisit the BPI group. We see both the instance-specific group and the larger group are once again in an OK state:

Intelligent Alerting

As we’ve shown above, Business Process Intelligence not only provides handy visual insight into group status but also directly alerts you when a group enters a Warning or Critical state. You can quickly and easily configure monitoring and alerting for the entire group as an individual service using Nagios XI’s built-in BPI Wizard. Take a look at our Log Server Cluster through the lens of a Service that was created with the Wizard:

The “Using BPI in Nagios XI” guide is an excellent resource to help you learn how to manage your groups, including details on initial setup, group alert logic, and using the Wizard.

Centralized Monitoring with Nagios Fusion Dashlet

Another great feature is the BPI Dashlet in Nagios Fusion, which provides you with centralized visibility of the status of all your BPI groups across multiple Nagios XI servers, and empowers you with single-click access to the BPI page on each:

You can learn more about the role Nagios Fusion and each of the other Nagios solutions play in providing a holistic monitoring perspective here.

An Enterprise Edition Extra

The Enterprise Edition of Nagios XI also automatically enables you to leverage the Host groups and Service groups you define as BPI groups. To learn more about setting up your groups, and about this great Enterprise Feature, the following video will be an excellent resource:

As you can see from the example, Business Process Intelligence is a powerful feature. Careful cultivation of meaningful BPI groups will empower you to more quickly identify individual issues preventing complex processes from carrying out their critical tasks and get your IT infrastructure back online faster.

• BPI Overview
• The BPI User Interface
• BPI Permissions Summary
• Understanding the BPI Group Logic
• Service Checks for BPI Groups
• Manual configuration, XML Output, and Troubleshooting

This document is intended for use by and Nagios XI Administrators who wish to create and monitor “Business Processes” out of hosts and services in their monitoring environments.

Using BPI in Nagios XI – 2024 & 2026

Using BPI in XI 2026

Using BPI in Nagios XI – v5 (Legacy)

Using BPI in XI 5

For detailed instructions on downloading, installing, and setting up a service check for Nagios BPI, see the Nagios BPI documentation listed on the Nagios Exchange.

Nagios Business Process Intelligence

This tool can also be used in conjunction with a check plugin and wizard to allow for notifications through Nagios.  This document describes how to fully utilize the Nagios Business Process Intelligence (or BPI) add-on and incorporate checks into Nagios.

Nagios XI 2024 & 2026

Using BPI in Nagios XI 2026

Nagios XI 5.x (Legacy)

Using BPI in XI 5 (Legacy)

Note that BPI is automatically built into Nagios XI.

Using the BPI Add-on in Nagios Core

Using the BPI Add-on in Nagios Core

Note that Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is pre-loaded in Nagios XI, no installation is necessary.

Integrating Nagios BPI with Nagios Core