The icclab participated on the Nagios World Conference 2014 which took place Oct 13th-16th, 2014 in St. Paul, MN, USA. Icclab’s Cloud High Availability-initiative leader Konstantin Benz presented an approach on how to use Nagios Core to monitor utilization of OpenStack resources. The key point he mentioned was that Nagios has to be reconfigured elastically in order to monitor virtual machines in an OpenStack environment. Depending on implementation requirements, it can be useful to exploit configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef to automatically reconfigure the Nagios server as soon as new VMs are commissioned or decommissioned by cloud users. Another approach could be to exploit OpenStack’s Ceilometer component though an integration of Nagios with Ceilometer could lead to data duplication which can be problematic for some systems, said Benz. Besides the Nagios-Ceilometer plugin Benz was able to show how elastic Nagios reconfiguration could work with Python fabric and the Cuisine library. This approach seems to be a lightweight solution to monitor VM utilization in OpenStack with Nagios. Benz also discussed a similar approach which has been chosen in the XIFI-project. The eXtensible Infrastructures for Future Internet cloud project uses Nagios as main monitoring tool to monitor OpenStack instances and resources provided by OpenStack.
A highlight of the Nagios conference was a demo presentation of Nagios Log Server which was announced by Nagios Founder Ethan Galstad. Nagios Log Server allows for scalable and fast querying of log files – fully replacing “ELK”-Stack (ElasticSearch, LogStash, Kibana) solutions. Nagios Log Server is available under a perpetual licence that costs $995. Compared to commercial solutions this is a very modest price. In contrast to ELK-Stack solutions, Nagios Log Server offers user authentication to protect sensitive data in logfiles to be viewable by unauthorized website visitors. Another advantage are customizable visual dashboards that show log file findings. Visualization makes the task of reporting incidents to higher management a lot easier and allows for better monitoring.