Reports can be viewed, exported as various file types, and emailed in the Standard Edition of XI. Reports can be scheduled for automatic delivery in the Enterprise Edition. In this article, we’ll take a look at each report to give you an idea of the value each provides. To learn more about all of the various settings available to help you narrow down and fine-tune what your reports display, you can take a look at this document:

Generating Reports in Nagios XI

Available Reports

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary report consolidates Availability, Top Alert Producers, the Alert Histogram, and Latest Alerts into a single report, providing an excellent high-level look at the performance of your infrastructure.

Availability

This report provides pie charts indicating the percentage of the chosen time period that your selected hosts, services, or groups were working or in problem states such as Warning, Critical, and Unreachable.

SLA

The SLA report is an Enterprise Edition feature that provides an easy way to verify whether you’ve met your SLA targets for monitored objects and groups. Simply choose the whens and whats to get results:

State History

State History provides a detailed, change-by-change look at issues and recoveries over time.

Top Alert Producers

Gain insight into which hosts and services had the most issues during the selected time period with Top Alert Producers.

Alert Histogram

Alert Histogram provides a compact graph of the number of alerts over time.

Notifications

The Notifications report provides a list of all notifications sent by Nagios XI for the selected objects over the selected time period.

Event Log

The Event Log lists Nagios Core engine events, including alerts and retention data auto-saves (the function of Core that saves current state history in the retention.dat file so that if the Core engine is restarted, the state can be referenced as the last known state).

Bandwidth Usage

The Bandwidth Usage report shows daily, weekly, monthly, and annual traffic graphs for each interface you monitor with the Network Switch/Router wizard, along with In/Out/Max/Sum data in a table at the bottom.

Capacity Planning

This Enterprise Edition feature enables you to project future usage based on the historical performance data you’ve collected to help you stay ahead of resource overload and roll out upgrades before they impact your key business processes.

Network Report

This report provides chord diagrams showing top talkers in your network, based on flow data collected by Nagios Network Analyzer. It’s quick and easy to integrate Network Analyzer with XI, and these reports begin to provide data as soon as the two tools are linked.

Network Query

The second Network Analyzer report available in XI, Network Query puts all of the queries you’ve created in Network Analyzer at your fingertips:

Data Visualizations

Alert Heatmap

The Alert Heatmap provides a visually striking perspective on the intensity of alerts over time.

Alert Stream

This handy stream graph provides a visual representation of the quantity of alerts over time:

Alert Timeline

View all of the alerts detected by Nagios over time with the Alert Timeline and click on any of the event dots for further details about the individual event.

Network Replay

Network Replay is a great visualization that combines time with topology, enabling you to play through state changes over time, viewed on the Hypermap network diagram.

Legacy Reports

In this section you’ll find the basic legacy Nagios Core reports, in case you’d like to view them inside of Nagios XI.

Audit Log

The Audit Log is also worth a mention, providing details on the usage and functions of your XI system. This Enterprise Edition report can be filtered by User Interface, Core Config Manager, Subsystem, API, Core, and Other for quick access to specific subsets of audit data. For example, filtering by User Interface will show you when users accessed the web UI:

Graphs

Although performance graphs do make an appearance in regular reports such as Bandwidth Usage, Nagios XI has an array of additional graphing tools built in. To learn more about those, you can take a look at this article:

Use Nagios XI Graphs to Illuminate Your Infrastructure

Getting Started

If you’d like to try out all of the reports yourself, you can take the free 30-day trial for a spin:

Nagios XI Free Trial Downloads

If you need a hand during your trial, we have a variety of resources available. Email us at sales@nagios.com, and we’d be happy to assist you.

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:

Nagios XI Free Trial Downloads