Compare Multi-tenancy Across 5 Nagios Tools
Multi-tenancy is a key feature of Nagios tools, enabling you to customize and limit user access and visibility in your Nagios monitoring setup.
This is especially important if you have an extensive environment or large team where different users and groups manage specific segments. You may wish to have everything from read-only viewers to full access superadmins accessing the Nagios user interfaces (UIs), with varying degrees in-between.
In this article we’ll take a look at the multi-tenancy options available in each Nagios solution.
Nagios XI Multi-tenancy
XI provides the most robust multi-tenancy capabilities of the entire Nagios suite. What each user you create can see and do in the user interface is deeply customizable. By default, the visibility and object control granted to regular users will be limited to those hosts and services they are a Contact on, but you can also check a box in the Security Settings section to allow them to see all hosts and services. You also decide which Users have access to the REST API, auto-deployment, and the Core Config Manager, and can click a single box to make any User read-only.
To create and edit Users in Nagios XI, navigate to Admin > Manage Users.
Nagios XI Dashboards
Dashboards in XI can be deployed to other users easily in the Dashboards > Deploy Dashboards menu. You can even either let the users you deploy to update their copy of the Dashboard as they see fit or choose to keep it synced with changes you make.
Nagios Core
Nagios Core is the open source monitoring engine used by Nagios XI. Although all configuration is done from the Linux command line, it does provide a basic web display which shows status information and a includes a few options for interacting with the monitoring engine. Object visibility in the Core interface can be limited based on what hosts and services users are contacts on, as can their ability to send commands to the Core daemon.
Nagios Fusion
In Nagios Fusion, users you create can either be a User or an Administrator. If you check the Administrator box in General Settings for a user, they will be able to see and access the Admin menu and all of its functions:
Fusion also provides the ability to determine which of the fused servers you’re collecting data from each user should be able to see in the Server User Mapping section of their user settings. In the case of fused Nagios XI servers, you can also map your Fusion users to XI users so that within the Fusion UI, and when they click through to the XI UIs, the objects they can see will be tied to their XI user.
Your favorite Dashboards in Fusion can also be deployed to other users just like in Nagios XI.
To manage Fusion users, navigate to Admin Admin > Manage Users.
Nagios Log Server
In Nagios Log Server, you have the ability to control both which log sources users can see data from, and which menus and functions they can access. Admin level users can modify and delete across all components and settings, while User level users are limited to editing only their account and personal dashboards, unless other User Permissions are granted using the checkboxes in the Admin > User Management > Create/Edit User menu, in the Permissions tab.
You can also restrict visibility of source log data to Host Lists (groups of sources you create), or individual sources, as well as determining whether API access is available.
On the Dashboards front, each Dashboard users create can be saved as a personal Dashboard visible only to them, or as a Global Dashboard visible to all Log Server users.
Finally, query-based Log Server alerts can be easily integrated with Nagios XI for additional control of user visibility.
Nagios Network Analyzer
In Network Analyzer, all users have full visibility of the entirety of Source data, but you determine whether they are a full access Admin, or a regular User which hides the configuration options and limits what they can edit. You also determine whether each regular user has API access:
You can also integrate Network Analyzer alerts with Nagios XI if you’re using both solutions, and limit access in the XI UI to only certain source alerts to control visibility.
Navigate to the Administration > User Management menu to create and edit Network Analyzer users.
Resources
If you’d like to take any or all of the Nagios tools for a spin, you can find free trial download links here:
Also feel free to contact us at sales@nagios.com if there are any questions we can assist you with, or if you’d like a custom Demo or Quickstart remote session to help you explore Nagios further.
