NagiosQL – Configure Nagios from the web

NagiosQL is a web based administration tool for Nagios 2.x, 3.x and Icinga 1.x. It helps you to easily build a complex configuration with all options, manage and use them. NagiosQL is based on a webserver with PHP, MySQL and local file or remote access to the Nagios configuration files via ssh or ftp.

The product relies on a Mysql DB which keep all the configurations for Nagios, there is also the option “dump to disk” which writes all configuration files of Nagios, you can also import from Nagios configuration text files to the database.

Tested release

NagioSQL it’s been tested on a Debian 6.0 (squeezi), the package it’s not availabe on the official repository, so i’ve downloaded version 3.1.0 directly from the site.
The installation is just to put the php files in a directory accessible through the web server, after that connecting with a browser to that location and follow the installation wizard that initializes and prepares the mysql DB. As requisite you’ll need an Apache with mod_php and a mysql server, all available with Debian. For the complete guide check the official site

Look and feel

The product don’t has a fancy graphic, it shows a menu on the left of the screen and a central windows for configuration of the items, at first glance is not all that intuitive, but its learning curve is really fast and when you have tried the creation of a service template, a service and an host things start to become more familiar and after these you can create a lot of checks in a few time. There is also an inline help that’s really useful, but there is not so much documentation at the moment on the main site.

Features:

• Possibility to define any configuration of Nagios through a web interface.
• Possibility to limit the visibility of certain menu to specific users, for example, you can not show the menu used to define new checks, so that the user can use only those defined.
• Possibility to use a template for the definition of services, hosts, contacts etc.
• The definition of each service is very detailed but clear enough, involves the use of standard templates and personalization with its own parameters for the check that you are defining ($ARG$, etc).

• Ability to manage multiple instances of Nagios/Icinga through the use of ssh and/or ftp.
• Automatically back up configuration files for each modification and there is possibility of deletion of the unused backups from the web interface.
• Ability to write all the configuration files, verify them, and then restart the Nagios from a single menu.
• Many translations available

Conclusions

The tool could be very useful in those contexts where more than 1 people put hand to the Nagios configuration and then you want to keep a certain uniformity in the writing of the check using some standard template that you define.
It’s also true that the product give a lot of freedom to the users so it is theoretically possible to build multiple templates or check similar but with slightly different configurations.

Personally, I liked its simplicity but power in the definition of checks and management of all through a single web interface, if you are using Nagios or Icinga i suggest to give to this tool a try.

Resources

NagiosQL on Debian
Installing NagiosQL 3 on CentOS Linux 5.4

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