NagiosTV

Monitor your infrastructure with style.

NagiosTV is a user interface add-on for the Nagios monitoring system https://www.nagios.org

Compatible with Nagios Core 4, Nagios XI, and MK Livestatus.

Bubble up the most important stuff to the top. Focus only on the work that needs to be done.

Large bold fonts and bright colors - so it's easily read from across the room.

A great conversation piece during an outage.

Originally designed to be viewed on a wall mounted TV, but also looks great on your phone or desktop monitor.

This is not meant to be a replacement for the entire Nagios web interface, but a way to just look at the “what's down?” part.

Some of the features:

New items slide in and out of place with smooth animations which looks really cool when things are happening.
Sorting - Ability to order items newest or oldest first
Filters - so you can hide WARNING, CRITICAL, UNREACHABLE, UNKNOWN, PENDING, ACKED, SCHEDULED, FLAPPING, or NOTIFICATIONS DISABLED states
Multi language support - English, Spanish and French so far
One-click update to latest version within the app

NagiosTV also has some fun addons:

Sound effects for state changes
Speak the state changes
Doom Guy (Flynn), the character from the game Doom. This is just a bit of added fun to bring some emotion to server monitoring. The more services are down, the more angry Flynn gets.
Emoticons to show how many items up vs down, and happiness the longer you have quiet time between issues.

Technology

NagiosTV is a JavaScript single page application. The frontend is using the React JavaScript framework.

Installing NagiosTV

Download the latest NagiosTV tar.gz release from https://github.com/chriscareycode/nagiostv-react/releases or you can just copy and paste the command below to get it:

$ wget https://github.com/chriscareycode/nagiostv-react/releases/download/v0.7.4/nagiostv-0.7.4.tar.gz

Extract the NagiosTV release using tar. This will create a nagiostv/ folder.

$ tar xvfz nagiostv-0.7.4.tar.gz

We're going to host the NagiosTV folder from the built-in Nagios web ui. Copy/Move the nagiostv/ folder into your Nagios web ui folder. For Nagios Core 4 the Nagios web ui folder might be at /usr/local/nagios/share/ or /usr/nagios/share/. Nagios XI might be at /var/www/html.

$ sudo mv nagiostv /usr/local/nagios/share/

Load the app in your web browser! If your built-in Nagios web ui is at http://my-server/nagios/ then NagiosTV should be available at http://my-server/nagios/nagiostv/
Since nagiostv/ is a subfolder in your Nagios web ui, it will share the same authentication as the built-in Nagios web ui.

Preparing the client settings file (optional)

By default, settings are saved to a browser cookie. If you want to save settings on the server, so all users of NagiosTV will get those settings, you need to create a client-settings.json file. We do not include this file in the NagiosTV release so it will not be overwritten when you upgrade. NagiosTV will read this client-settings file when the app loads. If you want the NagiosTV web interface to be able to save to this server configuration file for you, you will also want to set permissions on that file. In the example below, I show the two options below, first chown and second with chmod. Change the www-data to your own apache user, which is often different depending on white Linux distro you are running:

$ sudo touch client-settings.json
$ sudo chown www-data:www-data client-settings.json

$ sudo touch client-settings.json
$ sudo chmod 777 client-settings.json

Upgrading Automatically

As of version v0.6.0 there is now an update routine included that you can run from within NagiosTV. We call this automatic, but it does not update on it's own. We have a page within the NagiosTV UI that provides you with upgrade (and downgrade) with a click of the button. The script performs these actions:

download the release
unarchive the release into temp/ folder
copying the release over the old NagiosTV

Find the update page at the bottom of the Settings page, or by clicking any update notification in the bottom bar. More instructions are displayed on the update page.

Preparing NagiosTV for automatic update

For automatic upgrade to work, your NagiosTV folder needs to be owned by the apache user. The apache user is different on many different Linux distributions, so You could use ps or ps -aux | grep apache to find that username. In the example below, change www-data to your apache user, and change usr/local/nagios/share/nagiostv to be the path to your NagiosTV folder you just installed.

$ sudo chown www-data:www-data /usr/local/nagios/share/nagiostv

Then inside the application, open Settings and find the Update NagiosTV button, or click the update notification NagiosTV version in the bottom bar, and read more instructions there.

Upgrading Manually

Grab the latest release from here: https://github.com/chriscareycode/nagiostv-react/releases

Then pretty much the same process as above. Download and overwrite the nagiostv folder with the new version. Remember your web ui destination folder /usr/local/nagios/share/nagiostv/ may vary depending on your Nagios install. You can do it on the box with:

$ wget https://github.com/chriscareycode/nagiostv-react/releases/download/v0.7.4/nagiostv-0.7.4.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz nagiostv-0.7.4.tar.gz
$ sudo cp -r nagiostv/* /usr/local/nagios/share/nagiostv/

Update CLI script

This command line autoupdate script can be used to upgrade or downgrade to any version easily. This has been superceded by the AutoUpdate within the NagiosTV UI. (see above) To update this way, go into your nagiostv/ folder and run this command for more instructions:

$ sh autoupdate.sh

FAQ - Bypassing Authentication

This is probably the most common question I get - "How do I disable or bypass authentication?"

There are some circumstances where you may want to bypass authentication. For example, if you are running the display on a Television that would be difficult to deal with the login prompt. It is worth noting here that removing authentication for NagiosTV can decrease the security of your Nagios installation. If you do this, make sure your server is private and not connected to the Internet.

I have done a writeup on how to bypass authentication over on the NagiosTV.com website: https://nagiostv.com/bypassing-authentication

History

NagiosTV was started around 2008. Originally it was called ajax-monitor-for-nagios. Over the years I have continued to run it at home to monitor my own network.

Originally it was written in PHP for Nagios 3 and used the "ndoutils package to get status. ndoutils would write the statuses into a MySQL database, and the UI would read the statuses from the database. This ended up being a very painful install for many, requires a database server, and the database size continuously grew and needed maintenance and trimming.

Later I released JavaScript versions which used "MK livestatus", and experimented with another another version using "status-json". These seemed a lot better since they got rid of the database requirement, but still required installation that many users were not willing or able to do.

Now with Nagios 4, Nagios Core 4.0.7 and newer comes with new JSON CGI's built-in. This allows NagiosTV to read status data from Nagios with no external dependencies.

This project is the latest in many rewrites of NagiosTV. It uses React, connecting to the new Nagios CGIs. More recently, MK Livestatus connector was added.

Development

Check out README-development.md for instructions to build and run in development mode

kmalinich / nagiostv-react