Feedback and Comments

[mguthrie]

Hey Everybody,

We're interested in getting your feedback and suggestions for the Nagios V-Shell. Let me know what you think or if you have and problems or bugs.

[whit]

With the default display, there's less viewable on the screen at once than in the classic Nagios display. Space is wasted. Having all the columns centered makes it very hard to read, too. The color choices are poor - light blue on green is nearly no contrast. The underlying concept of having something skinnable is solid, and I'm sure this will evolve into something good. But in this iteration, it's a step backwards.

Also, there needs to be an option to turn off menu options that don't match the user's rights. This is also lacking in the core. There no reason to waste screen space and user time with options that really don't exist for them.

[mguthrie]

We do appreciate the feedback as it helps us in future development of this project. Here are a couple of notes regarding the project that may help meet your needs.

The V-Shell is not currently made to be a replacement for the Core Interface, but currently an optional addon that will allow users more easily customize the look and feel of their own interface.

All page formatting is controlled with a single CSS stylesheet. Options such as font-size, text-alignment, an color-schemes can all be modified per install to better meet a user's preference.

Currently, if basic authentication is used, the V-Shell pull access information from the cgi.cfg file and displays menu items according to the permissions specified for Nagios Core. Yes, there are differences and limitations currently, as there is no host or service filtering based who is a contact. This is set to be a future development for this project, and we're hoping for some interest from the community to help develop this project further.

This interface may not meet everyone's tastes or interests, and that's ok. This is why we recommend users pick their front end based on their own tastes and needs for an interface.
http://www.nagios.org/download/frontends/

[sanchezpaa]

First of all thank you for the great work! I was developing something similar in my company, but it was taking too long to update my pages (due to +1400 hosts and +5000 services) and I once read that Nagios was moving from cgi to php, so I scraped it. Anyway I'm very glad you finally developed it. Again, due to our large number of hosts and services, I've been working with Mathias Kettner's livestatus which greatly improves refreshing time. The reason for this post, besides congratulating and thanking all the persons who help Nagios become the industry standard, is that I'm adapting vshell to use livestatus and was wondering how I could make these available to you?

[mguthrie]

Go ahead and email me directly at mguthrie@nagios.com with any proposed patches, contributions, etc, and I'd be glad to take a look at them and see what I can do to implement them. We appreciate the feedback and the interest in the project!

I can definitely see the need to decrease the load time for larger quantities of services. My next change I'm hoping to implement in V-Shell is paging ability for the host and service pages, so they only return about 50-100 listings at a time.

[sarfa]

Hello ,
I've just installed the Nagios Visual Shell frontend for my Nagios3 system.
this is a great GUI and it is working just fine.

Do you know if the upcoming versions of this GUI will support active changes and configuration on the Nagios Core system from the V-Shell itself?
like change hosts/service/contacts values ?

[mguthrie]

I think to maintain the flexibility of Core, what I'm going to do is add the ability for users to add new menu links so they can incorporate additional tools into the interface. That way that can add whatever config editor they prefer to the interface.

There are several good tools that currently exist for doing configuration from the web interface. Some users have a preference for a DB backend, while others still prefer the manual config files. The two big ones that I know of are :

NagiosQL:
http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Addons/Configuration/NagiosQL/details
Nconf:
http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Addons/Configuration/NConf/details


There may be a native configuration tool added to the V-Shell in the future, but for now the scope will be to mature the interface a bit more before moving in that direction. I appreciate the feedback though, it all helps me know what to focus on for future developments.

[jasonparker017]

Good job on GUI and I am not sure how many of us would admit but I like the visual appeal as well not to mention the user interface which is fabulous and is certain to be liked by most.

[mguthrie]

Glad you guys are liking it! Thanks for the feedback!