nagios

Throughout my day I need to monitor several different looking glasses at my system performance and availability. Not only do I have my distributed SmokePing machines feeding back to my Chicago monitoring server, I have several Cacti front-ends and a half-dozen Nagios boxes (including my internal and external machines and some virtual Nagios boxes we run for a managed monitoring system we offer to clients). Cacti and SmokePing are more documentation and troubleshooting tools to watch system performance, not really notification engines for alerting me to trouble (or potential trouble), so most of my time is spent tabbing through Nagios screens to get a roundup of the current system status in our datacenter and at our clients’ sites.

With so many separate Nagios installations, it’s hard to keep track of which tab is which customer, if I have all the tabs open, and even if the Nagios site is responding or if Firefox is frozen. Enter Nagioschecker, a plugin for Firefox that queries the status of all of my Nagios installations and will display an in-browser alert if/when there is an issue.

All I had to do was configure Nagioschecker with the URL and a username/password for each of my Nagios installations and now it will aggregate the alerts to my browser, no matter where I am at. Once loaded, they will alert me to any issues at any of my sites:

This utility has saved what little hair I have left, along with a great deal of my time. Thanks to the developer, Petr Simek. You’ll find the project site here and the Firefox Add-ons page here. Thanks, Petr!