A general "Getting to know Nagios XI"

[Box293]

I like in Nagios XI, when you first deploy the VM, you have tasks in dashlets that point you in the right direction. Like the ongoing task "Configuring your monitoring setup".

However after adding a few hosts, picking services you want to monitor and getting a general feel for the product, there may be ways to use Nagios XI that you have not discovered yet.

This is one document that could give people some direction about how to use the product. It doesn't have to have a lot of heavy detail, it could have one or two paragraphs on different subjects to inform the user of the capabilites of Nagios XI.

For example, something like:

Services
Services can be assigned to a host or they can be assigned to a host group. And then to go on and talk about each option, all that is needed is one paragraph for each option.


I understand that Nagios XI is based on Nagios and there is a lot of documentation out there specifically about how it all works and how to use it. However this means you need to go and find this out for yourself. If you had an overview of the functions of the product then you would know what you needed to go and read up on. There could be links in the document that point you to the full documentation online (accompanying each paragraph).

I really like Nagios XI because it has taken away the unknown Linux component. It has also taken away the complexities behind setting up a Nagios server. I like I can just extract a VM and whammo there is a fully functional running product ready to be used. This is a perfect example of a Virtual Appliance.

I am a Windows guy and we have been looking for a monitoring product for some time now. I had just started looking at Nagios (before XI was released) and I could see it was powerful. I also saw that it could be quite complicated for people who like point and click MS Windows. I got distracted at work for about 2 months and when I came back to revisit Nagios I found this Nagios XI product.

I don't think I would have been able to convince my superiors to implement a Nagios server if it was not for Nagios XI.

With a general "Getting to know Nagios XI" document (or video) you could give people the information they need to know quickly.

[mguthrie]

Thanks for your feedback. We're currently working on building our documentation library for XI. As we get documents and videos up, we're immediately posting them to http://library.nagios.com. We will soon have a manual for users, admins, and developers, all of which will be web accessible and eventually we will have those links built right into the Help menu of the XI interface. For now you'll need to browse around the library to find what you need, but we'll soon have it all consolidated and organized into manuals.