EC2 monitoring wizard hangs on get instances

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davemulv1
Posts: 38
Joined: Mon Dec 08, 2025 2:30 pm

EC2 monitoring wizard hangs on get instances

Post by davemulv1 »

Provide Access Key and Secret Access key. Click Get Available Instances. It hangs for a long time.

Eventually it comes back but the EC2 instances list is just an empty light orange box in the GUI. Any specific logs or other tips on troubleshooting this?

Thanks,

Dave
cdietsch
Posts: 79
Joined: Wed Aug 06, 2025 9:12 am

Re: EC2 monitoring wizard hangs on get instances

Post by cdietsch »

Hi @davemulv1,

I did a quick test of the EC2 wizard on Nagios XI 2026R1.7 and I could not recreate the issue that you are seeing. I am getting a list of instances back after 5-10 seconds.

Here are a few troubleshooting steps you could try:

Verify the AWS credentials and permissions

Confirm the Access Key and Secret Access Key are correct.
Ensure the IAM user or role has permission to perform at least:
  • ec2:DescribeInstances
  • ec2:DescribeRegions
  • ec2:DescribeTags
As a quick test, use the AWS CLI with the same credentials:

Code: Select all

aws ec2 describe-instances
If this fails, the issue is likely with the credentials or IAM policy rather than Nagios XI.

Check the selected AWS region
  • If the credentials are valid but there are no EC2 instances in the configured region, the wizard may appear to return an empty list.
  • Verify the instances actually exist in the region being queried.
Review the Nagios XI logs
Depending on the XI version, useful logs include:

Code: Select all

tail -f /usr/local/nagiosxi/var/php-fpm.log
tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log      # RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Oracle
tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log    # Ubuntu/Debian
tail -f /usr/local/nagiosxi/var/xi-syscfg.log
It would also be helpful to know:
  • Which web browser are you running?
  • Which Linux distribution is hosting Nagios XI?
  • Are there any messages in the browser console (F12 → Console)?
Cheers,
- Cole
davemulv1
Posts: 38
Joined: Mon Dec 08, 2025 2:30 pm

Re: EC2 monitoring wizard hangs on get instances

Post by davemulv1 »

Thanks for the reply Cole.

Got it working.

Our issue was we're using private connection and the wizard defaults to over the internet. We needed to define VPCs for monitoring and ec2 and used hostfile entries to point at those private addresses.

Thanks,

Dave
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