Keeping track of changes and inventory

[eltrasimaco]

When dealing with thousands of services/hosts, and lots of custom scripts, it is quite difficult to keep track about everything (additions, modifications, changes that were made ...)
Have tried unsuccessfully with things like dokuwiki and alike
Any recommendations, advice or directions about this matter? (existing software, hints, experiences ... )
Thanks in advance.

[npolovenko]

Hello, @eltrasimaco.
I'm not sure if you have an Enterprise version of XI, but if you do than Nagios Audit Log is a feature I'd recommend.
https://support.nagios.com/kb/article/n ... t-log.html
You can filter changes to the XI system by type, date, etc.

Another way would be to have XI run Core Configuration Manager snapshots daily. And then you could use some kind of a software tool to manually compare old configuration files to new ones. Or you could probably run a chron job on your system with ll -R and have it make a log with files that have changed.

Probably there's no solution that will perfectly fit for everyone. Perhaps any kind of a file backup solution that keeps track of the modified files could work?

And if you run Nagios on a VM i'd recommend doing snapshots. It's a great tool to recover your system to a stable state incase something goes wrong.

[eltrasimaco]

Yes, I saw the auditory log and is a great tool indeed,
but I was looking for something more ... "general", so that , along with changes, you could include some more information, groups, desciptions, inventory, failures, things like that

[npolovenko]

@eltrasimaco, I see. I think as of right now XI doesn't really keep track of services and hosts changes. Nagios can tell you that there was a change but it won't keep track of what exactly was changed.

So you could technically use core config manager snapshots and manually compare hosts.cfg, services.cfg files, ect.(because that's the files where Nagios writes services and hosts definitions). But there's no single GUI interface available as of right now to keep track of everything.

You could, however, use Nagios log files. Here's the reference: https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ptions.pdf And perhaps you could use Nagios Log Server to monitor all logs at once in a web interface: https://www.nagios.com/products/nagios-log-server/

PS: Also I recommend to take a look at the Event Log and Reports options in Nagios XI. These features are available in a web interface and they might contain some of the information you're looking for.

[eltrasimaco]

I'll take a look to all those things, thank you.

[kyang]

@eltrasimaco,
Sounds good, let us know if you have any more questions.