1. Using the Report

To access the report, navigate to the Reports menu, then select Capacity Planning. Next, select the Period (how far into the future you want to project), and select the specific Host, Hostgroup, or Servicegroup to graph the results for.

Once you make all of your customization selections, you can then save, email, export, and even (another great Enterprise Edition feature) schedule the report for automatic delivery at set times.

Alternately, you can navigate to the Status Detail page for a service and go to the Capacity Planning tab to view projections.

The options tabs to the right of the initial graph provide access to a data Summary, all of the individual data points, and the option to customize your Time Period and Extrapolation Method.

2. Adding Graphs to Dashboards

You’ll notice the Dashify icon on the upper left of each Capacity Planning graph, which you can click to easily add them to your Dashboards. This provides an easy way to quickly access at-a-glance projections for key services in your environment and to roll them into other Dashboards you’ve created.

3. Using the Wizard

It’s even possible to set up alerts on projections using the Capacity Planning Wizard, found in the Configure > Configuration Wizards menu. In Step 1 you’ll choose which service to monitor. Then in Step 2 you’ll choose how far ahead the check should look, what algorithm it should use, the projected value at which you want to be alerted, and how many days in advance of the resource hitting the custom value you wish to be alerted.

You can choose to either add the newly created services to the host under which the services producing the performance data reside or check the “Put all new services on a specific host” checkbox to assign them elsewhere (for example, to a dummy host reserved just for capacity planning checks).

You can click the Render Graph link at the bottom of the wizard to see a graph of current and projected data and to see where your Custom Value selection falls within it.

Once the checks are created, you can monitor them like any other service or even roll them into your Business Process Intelligence groups:

Resources

For a more detailed overview of using Capacity Planning, take a look at this guide:

How to Use Capacity Planning in Nagios XI

If you’d like a tour of all of the Enterprise Edition features, this article provides a comprehensive overview:

10 Great Features of the Nagios XI Enterprise Edition

If you’d like to try Capacity Planning out for yourself, we offer a free trial version you can take for a spin:

Nagios XI Free Trial Download

We’d also be happy to offer you a custom Demo session if want a guided tour of our solutions, or a free Quickstart remote session with a sales engineer to help you get a few things set up. You can email sales@nagios.com for details on setting up either option.

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