NETWAYS Blog

What is NETWAYS Portal for Nagios?
NETWAYS Portal for Nagios is basically a more user friendly alternative interface for Nagios, which allows much greater span for customisation especially in terms of user administration.
For the techies?
It is a set of Typo3 extensions, especially developed to offer a centralized view of complex, large scale Nagios monitoring environments. As it is based on XML templates and the main extension net_dbdata, it supports multiple Nagios instances and multiple NDO databases, while being also very flexible and configurable.
Why Typo3?
Being based on open CMS Typo3 allows user groups and user access rights to be configured and fine tuned. So for example in larger organisations views can be customised to vary by areas of responsibility or levels of management. It can even be connected to external authentication systems such as LDAP.
How does it work?
Nagios data is stored via NDO in a database where our net_dbdata extension reads host and service information, current status, alert and notification history, etc. This information is sent to the Portal and displayed. Commands given into the Portal are then sent to Nagios for execution via net_nagioscmd. Graphical representations of Nagios data are enabled with net_sproxy to display graphs or status maps from any source, such as NagiosGrapher or NagVis.

What’s new in version 3.0.1?
There are new views such as our SLA View and the Host Aggregated View. The SLA View displays host and server availability with an in built calendar to search periods of system availability. The Host Aggregated View gives an overview of all host states and number of errors collated one page, in a much clearer format.
What about useability?
We wanted to make interacting with Nagios clearer and easier so we added a few extras such as in screen comment windows (so you don’t have to leave the page to see the details), multi-commands and Ajax like search-selection fields.
What are multi-commands exactly?
The standard Nagios interface restricts the user to applying bulk commands to just hosts or their host groups. In the Portal, administrators can pick any individual host, host groups or service (simply by checking tick boxes) to apply Nagios commands to. Once they are selected, the command is carried out on all – as easy as a few clicks.
How is this interface for Nagios different from the others?
That would definitely have to be its greater customisation and configuration flexibility. Being able to handle multiple differentiated users, to create in essence a custom interface, with custom access rights for each user is definitely useful for larger organisations. Not only that, because it is based on TYPO3, it can integrate any application like wikis or ticketing systems. So it has a huge potential to extend beyond an interface for Nagios to a completely integrated monitoring environment.
The new NETWAYS Portal in a nutshell?
In all, it’s more user friendly – less clicking around to get to the information administrators need- and it’s simply more flexible.
More information:
Features & demo system
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