How to Maximize Your Free Trial of Nagios XI
Now that you’ve decided to take Nagios XI for a spin, you’re probably wondering “how do I get the most out of my free trial?” In this article we’ll discuss the most important things to test and explore to help you confirm that Nagios XI is right solution for your infrastructure monitoring, alerting, graphing, and reporting needs.
Monitor (One of) All the Things
One key objective to focus on during your trial is to test monitoring of each type of device and application you’d like to keep tabs on. The goal isn’t to monitor everything, but to monitor at least one of everything. Odds are that you’ll be able to set up monitoring of most items quickly and easily with the built-in monitoring wizards, using standard protocols and agents. Head to the Configure > Configuration Wizards menu to access the vast directory of default options:
A great starting point to familiarize yourself with the monitoring wizard process is to monitor a website and test email notifications. This Jumpstart video will walk you through the process:
The Monitoring Configuration section of the Admin Guide is another excellent resource.
For less common requirements that you don’t see a wizard for, a good first step is to check the thousands of free plugins on the Nagios Exchange community site, and the guide to Managing Plugins in Nagios XI. Here’s a link to the Plugin Development Guidelines as well if you want to really dig in and write your own.
On the notifications front, you can find documentation on topics such as setting up email notifications, SMS notifications, Gmail SMTP, Microsoft SMTP, and Slack integration here.
Take the UI for a Spin
Your free trial period is a great time to familiarize yourself with the web interface and the main features. A great first stop is the Home menu, which is filled with status and performance visualizations in the Quick View, Details, Graphs, and Maps sections. You’ll also notice quick links to key menu locations, and ways to reach us if you need a hand with anything:
One often overlooked feature found here in the Maps section is NagVis, a powerful open source project that’s built into Nagios XI by default, which enables you to create custom maps and diagrams overlaid with active status icons. You can learn more about NagVis in this article.
Dashboards and Reports are two more popular features well worth taking the time to explore, enabling you to customize how you visualize current status data and quantify historical results.
The Visualizations section of the Admin Guide will be a big help here.
Experience Enterprise
The free trial includes full access to all of the Enterprise Edition features as well, so using the trial period to experience their value is a great idea. You can navigate to the Enterprise menu in XI to view the directory and check out this article for a detailed overview of the functions and value of each.
Architect for Success
Nagios XI can not only monitor just about anything using the built-in wizards and plugins, the thousands of plugins on the Nagios Exchange, or custom plugins you write following the development guidelines. XI can also monitor actively and passively, with both agent-based and agent-less methods. Beyond how you approach monitoring individual items, there are also broader architectural considerations to understand, especially in large or geographically dispersed environments where multiple monitoring servers and more complex network permissions come into play. Time spent reviewing the available options and determining the best approach for your needs during the free trial will pay dividends later on as you move toward fully configuring your monitoring.
Here are some useful resources on related topics:
Distributed Monitoring Options
Our team would be happy to offer expert guidance on architectural considerations, feel free to contact us at sales@nagios.com with any questions.
Explore Best Practices
Learning about what impacts Nagios XI performance and how to optimize your deployment for success is another worthy endeavor during your trial period. Two documents that shed light on these topics are:
Maximizing Performance in Nagios XI
GET some REST
Nagios XI has a robust REST API that can be used for a variety of purposes, including fetching object status and system data, managing monitoring configs and users, and controlling the monitoring engine programmatically. You can find full details in the Help menu:
This article is a great starting point to learn more the REST API, including use cases and API call examples.
Demos and Quickstarts
If you’d like a guided personal tour of XI geared toward your unique requirements, or a hands-on remote session with one of our techs to help you get a few things set up, we’d love to offer you a free Demo or Quickstart. To set this up, or for any other help you may need, feel free to email sales@nagios.com so we can give you a hand. Our sales and technical teams will do all they can to help you maximize your free trial!
