Thruk a Monitoring Webinterface for Nagios

 In these days I’m testing an alternative web interface for Nagios : Thruk
The First impression is definitely positive, and so I decided to share this information so more people can know and use this software.

Thruk is an independent multibackend monitoring webinterface which currently supports Nagios, Icinga and Shinken as backend using the MKLivestatus addon.

It is designed to be a “dropin” replacement. The target is to cover 100% of the original features plus additional enhancements for large installations.

Main Features

• multiple backends
• faster, no need to parse status.dat for every request
• less cpu usage
• display live data, no delay between core and gui
• independant from monitoring core, can be installed on remote host
• clusterable, can be clustered over hosts
• change status.cgi filter inline
• extended logfile search
• better logging, uses log4perl (who submitted which command?)
• valid HTML code
• no frames ( can be reenabled for better addon integration)
• easy to extend with plugins
• 100% Perl (using Catalyst Framework)
• paging ( can be disabled and customized )
• multiple themes included
• Excel export

About MKLivestatus

MKLivestatus is a new Nagios Event Broker Module which serves the current status information of Nagios to 3rd party addons without bringing overhead like a database with it.

Secure your livestatus port, livestatus grants full access to nagios so it’s better to use Socat with SSL when possible

Development and clustering

Thruk is written in Perl with the Catalyst module.  There is no need to install Thruk on the same host as Nagios, the reuisitie it’s a webserver that can parse perl pages. Thruk can connect to one or more Nagios instances using MKLivestatus with a TCP socket over the network.

Installation

Thruk has many Perl module dependencies (~57 direct dependencies)

• Installation from source with GIT & CPAN is easy but time consuming
• Make use of Local::Lib
• There are pre configured packages for Debian/Centos/OpenSuse and FreeBSD that you can download on the official site

As alternative you can test Thruk in OMD (Open Monitoring Distribution). Installing Thruk with OMD is probably the easiest and fastest way of getting Thruk running.
OMD includes a preconfigured Nagios + Thruk + PNP4Nagios and other useful addons.

Demo

I think that the best way to understand if a software is good or not (at least for you) it’s to test it, so i invite you to go on Thruk demo site at http://demo.thruk where there are more than 20K services and many hosts available for your tests.

Conclusions

In these few days of use i must say that i’ve found Thruk more lightweight and responsive (i used the original Nagios cgi), and i really love his feature to select different services and apply to them a custom action (acknowledge them, schedule a downtime, put a comment, etc.).
I think that in my next future i’ll put this software as default web interface to our Nagios istances.

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