inventory management - filtered listing of host groups

[KiwiBloke]

Hi,

We have a new requirement to provide a list of systems for one of our clients. We were hoping that Nagios could do this for us (Since all the systems of interest are being monitored by Nagios already) but there doesn't seem to be a clean way of showing this information.

We seem to be able to show a very very basic count of systems via "Host Status Summary" (see attached hostStatusSummary.png) or we can dive deeper and get a summary for all host groups via "Status Summary for All Host Groups" (see attached statusSummaryForAllHostGRoups.png)

What we would like to be able to have is a hybrid of the two:
The basic info of the Host Status summary, but with the ability to show only selected HostGroups so we don't get overlaps.

We use HostGroups extensively to make Nagios easier to manage (rightly or wrongly we don't use service groups).

So if I use the following canned example to demonstrate

If we have two hosts, both windows servers, but one with Intel NICs and one with AMD NICs
So we have three hostgroups: windows servers, AMD NICs and Intel NICs
Both hosts are members of Windows servers, but each host only belongs to one of the NICs groups

So if we show a summary of all host groups it would look as if we have 4 hosts instead of the actual 2 because we see all the three host groups and see that one has two members and the other two both have one member. It overlaps.

(At the service level we apply the Windows server group to CPU, memory, uptime, etc etc and we apply the two NIC groups to the appropriate service group for each brand.)

if there a way to suppress or filter what hostrgoups are shown when we select "Status Summary for all Host Groups". This way the inventory list would only show the number of core groups to the client (eg Windows Servers, network Switches, ESXi Servers etc) and ignore the tweaks such as NIC brand etc.

I appreciate this may not be entirely clear, and I may have missed some reporting functionality that already performs this feat.

Cheers,

KB

[abrist]

You could add few specific "Hostgroup Overview" dashlets to a new dashboard in order to show only the desired hostgroups. Once finished and arranged, you could then schedule a report of the dashboard.

[KiwiBloke]

Hi,

Yeah, I had toyed with this, but unfortunately it exposes too much information (hostnames) so it contravenes one of our security policies about minimizing exposure of the internals of our systems.

This is why that "Host Status Summary" is good as it only gives numbers.

What would be great would be if we could filter this dashlet to show us only numbers of say SQL servers ... then have multiple filtered dashlets on a dashboard and schedule it as a pdf report.

I see that its not possible to see the source for this dashlet via manage dashlets, so don't even have the option of extracting it, tweaking it to make it unique and then uploading back up to the server for use in reports.

We have a host group called "Windows Servers" whicvh contains other hostgroups (eg web servers, proxy servers etc etc)but when rendered it boils down to the individual server hostnames rather than the intermediate hostgroup names. This would also meet our needs.

Do you have any other cunning things I could try?

KB.

[KiwiBloke]

Hi,

I've had a break though!

If you bring up the Host Group Status - Summary view you get a list of all your host groups, along with the Host and Service Status Summaries in the top right hand corner.

if you click on the Hosts link on one of your host groups it drills down to focus just on that host group (and the server it contains.) But this is the great bit. if you look at the Host and Service Summaries in the top corner they have changed to focus only on the filtered list.

You can then add these to your dashboard and rinse and repeat to build up a report summarizing the number of hosts and services for the host groups you want to show. A per the attached example report I have attached.

ExampleInventoryReport.png

Thanks for your help in getting me to this point.

KB.