Go Big with Nagios XI’s Bulk Object and Incident Management Options

Nagios XI can monitor, alert, graph, and report on just about anything, and also has a variety of tools designed to help you manage your monitoring, notifications, and incidents in bulk. In this article we’ll explore the many functions XI provides to help save you time when it matters most.

Home Menu Homeruns

Several key bulk management tools can be found in Nagios XI’s Home > Incident Management menu.

• Mass Acknowledge provides a list of all unhandled problems, and can be used to either acknowledge, schedule downtime, acknowledge and schedule downtime together, or schedule an immediate check for any objects you select via checkboxes. There’s also a ‘Check All Items’ button in case you want to take an action on all of them.

• Mass Downtime provides a list of all monitored objects, and enables you to schedule or remove downtime on any or all.

• Mass Immediate Check provides a list of all objects in problem states, and provides a way to run an immediate check on them.

• Mass Toggle Notifications lists all monitored objects, and provides a quick way to enable and disable their notifications.

Bulk Host Cloning and Import Wizard

This wizard is an excellent tool for quickly configuring monitoring of many like hosts. Once you’ve configured and tested monitoring of one, you can use it as a reference to configure as many new hosts as you’d like by simply running the wizard, choosing the services you want to apply to the new hosts, and adding their IP addresses. You can also add a custom Name, Description, Display Name, Hostgroup, and Parent Host for each using the Field dropdowns at the bottom of the wizard.

Bulk Modifications and Renaming

You can find these powerful Enterprise Edition features by either going to the Enterprise main menu or in the Tools section of the Core Config Manager.

• Bulk Modifications enables you to rapidly change a single granular setting on many hosts or services at once.

• Bulk Renaming allows you to not only rename many objects at once, but to retain historical performance data when you do so.

You can check out this video for step-by-step details on using the powerful Bulk Modifications Tool:

Notification Settings Management

Notification Settings Management is another excellent Enterprise Edition feature that provides a way to deploy notification messages, preferences, and time periods to many Users at once.

Auto-Discovery

The Auto-Discovery feature in XI provides a way to run an nmap scan of your network, returning a list of discovered IP addresses, detected device types and operating systems, and the open ports/services running on them. The scan results can be exported as a CSV, or you can configure basic monitoring and even deploy agents to the detected hosts. You can find this tool in the Configure > Auto-Discovery menu.

Deploy Agent

The Deploy Agent tool is found in the Configure > Auto Deployment section. It enables you to deploy NCPA (the Nagios Cross Platform Agent) to your Linux, Windows, and OSX hosts directly from the XI web interface.

REST API

In large environments, the Nagios XI REST API often proves to be an invaluable feature, providing all the hooks you’ll need to integrate with things like automation tools and advanced business intelligence platforms. You can find all of the API docs in the Help menu.

Distributed Monitoring Models

Nagios XI supports multiple distributed options for large and geographically separated environments where it may be necessary or desirable to have multiple monitoring servers.

• In a Federated model, you’ll employ multiple Nagios servers across your network and set them all to feed the data they collect upstream to another XI server for centralized visibility, reporting, and incident management. You can learn more about the built-in inbound and outbound check capability here.
• In a Fusion model, you’ll also employ multiple Nagios servers to cover segments of your infrastructure, then Nagios Fusion will poll them and provide you with centralized tactical visibility and quick access to each of your XI servers for deeper reporting and management tasks.
• Another great option is Nagios Mod Gearman (NMG), a Nagios Event Broker module that can be used for load reduction, load balancing, and distributed monitoring. NMG is pre-loaded in Nagios XI 2024R2.1+, where it can be managed right from the web interface. NMG can also be manually integrated with Nagios XI versions as early as 2024R1.2 and Nagios Core 4.5+. You can learn more about NMG in this article:

Gear Up with Nagios Mod-Gearman: Maximize and Distribute Checks Efficiently

As you can see, Nagios XI has a wealth of capabilities geared toward helping you carry out key tasks quickly, easily, and at scale. You can find the free trial here if you’d like to try them out yourself, and if you have any questions our team would be happy to assist you at [email protected].