Nagvis HOWTO

Nagios is a great monitoring tool. Basically you can take the raw product and have it up and running within the hour. You need to remember the scope of your viewers. Having a dashboard with number is not going to fly with management. Management needs information now and cannot afford the luxury of digging through your nagios dashboard to obtain information (do you really want non-IT people looking through an application that shows the status of every server and service in your environment?).
Nagvis is the tool you need to add meaning to your nagios installation. Organizations have diagrams pertaining to various systems, so you need to add meaning to those systems for management. I have found the perfect solution to creating those diagrams. Simply export the diagram in either “tiff” or “png” format and use it as your background.
Some screenshoots

Latest version 1.4.2  was just release on 15/08/09, the cool new features I noticed was SOUND, and Automap really works now. Just add the root=”NagiosServer” and then make the NagiosServer Parent of some hosts they will load automaticly into the map.

HOWTO INSTALL:

Download
# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/nagvis/NagVis%201.4%20%28stable%29/NagVis-1.4.2/nagvis-1.4.2.tar.gz
Uncompress
# tar -zxvf NagVis-1.4.2
# cd NagVis-1.4.2
# bash install.sh
Fix  dependicies
Install graphvis:
# apt-get install libgd2-noxpm
# apt-get install graphvis
Again try installting it:
# bash install.sh
NDO DB Information
Edit, and enter ndo DB (user/pass)information here:
# vim /usr/local/nagios/share/nagvis/etc/nagvis.ini.php
Restart apache
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Browse to it
http://<ipnagios>/nagios/nagvis

NOTE:
In my casae I got errors about time.zone so I had to edit the php.ini file and add the time.zone = UTC to make it work

HOWTO USE IT:

1. Insert your premade image (background) into nagvis
http:///nagios/nagvis/config.php
RightClick>Manage>Maps > IMPORT MAP (select the file)
Or Copy using WinSCP to:
/usr/local/nagios/share/nagvis/nagvis/images/maps
2.Create the new map:
http:///nagios/nagvis/config.php
Right click on the page and select “manage -> maps”.
Select the previsouly loaded Background image
3.Add services
Add Object>Icon>Services
HOSTNAME> (select from the list)

Troubleshooting:

edit the files .cfg in:
/usr/local/nagios/share/nagvis/etc/maps
Configure NagVis via browser
http://localhost/nagvis/config.php
time.zone problem
This lists Nagvis issues when setting up. The FAQ section has more questions regarding using Nagvis.
Timezone warning message
I get some timezone warning messages on the Nagvis screens:
Strict Standards: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘UTC’ for ‘GMT/0.0/no DST’ instead in /usr/local/nagios/nagvis/nagvis/includes/classes/objects/NagVisStatefulObject.php on line 360
You have to set a default timezone. The simplest way is to add into the php.ini file. For Debian, this is in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini. Add the entry:
date.timezone=UTC
Restart apache.

Please Help me out with a simple Click:

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Thanks