Various minor issues

[jsmurphy]

Hi guys,

I've been getting a fair bit of feedback from my users recently and the following three grievances have popped up more than any other:

1. There is no way to view the full status text in Nagios XI if it's a single long string of text, which is particularly problematic for those users who have never had to interact with Nagios Core.

2. Non-admin users can't view the Network Outages page.

3. This is a weird one... sometimes on some hosts/services the advanced->commands panel doesn't appear for users who should have administrative access to use it. The really weird bit is that this occurs even on hosts where the only difference as far as Nagios is concerned is the Hostname. Right now in the rare circumstances where it doesn't appear I'm just having users click the link to go to Nagios Core and set it from that page where it works fine.

I'm currently using r2.1.

[scottwilkerson]

1) I'm not so familiar with this one...

2) Users can view that page but they need "Can see/control monitoring engine:" checked in the settings.

3) We might need to try to get a bit more detailed to reproduce this. Any special charecters in the hostname? Is the contact assigned directly to the host or to a hostgroup? Through a contact group or directly?

[mguthrie]

1. There is no way to view the full status text in Nagios XI if it's a single long string of text, which is particularly problematic for those users who have never had to interact with Nagios Core.

From what I remember, the cutoff in ndoutils is 8k, but the XI interface might cut off after 4k.

[jsmurphy]

1. Yeah what Mike said it's come up on here a few times before a long time ago, it's only affecting a few users... mostly our SAN guys and our middleware guys as they have these big-ass lists of every volume/transfer queue and sometimes lots of them have crossed the "display threshold" and they won't be able to see the full scope of impact.

2. "Can see/control monitoring engine" is very much an administrative feature... it's not something I really want to hand out to every Nagios user in the business who can make use of the Outages feature... particularly the help desk.

3. There are no special characters in the hostnames, they are all alphanumeric and assignment is done in the form of contact -> contact group -> contact group -> host template -> host or contact -> contact group -> contact group -> service. I've been trying to replicate it reliably in my own environment on and off for about a month now but I've not been able to do so to provide even an educated guess as to what could be causing it.

[mguthrie]

#1. For something like this, I would almost consider a custom addon component just for larger data dumps like this. Maybe write a wrapper script for these plugins that dumps the data into a separate place where all of these checks can be sorted and viewed in full. Or, you write an event handler that dumped the plugin output somewhere upon certain state changes. Although Core does display the full output, increasing the length of output in XI would likely create some problems.

#2. I would agree in that you don't want to give control of the monitoring engine to just any user. I'm guessing that hiding the Network Outages page had a reason, but we'll take a look at it and find out why.

#3. Keep an eye out for this one, we'll look for it too. Have these hosts or services having the issue ever been renamed?

[jsmurphy]

Cheers guys, I'll keep on trying to discern something a little more helpful in regards to #3.