Is Nagios a good fit for my use case?
Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 4:40 pm
Hi folks,
Please help me determine whether Nagios is the right platform for my monitoring needs. Here's the use case:
We manage thousands of end-user endpoints (computers, phones, and tablets) globally using a Mobile Device Management platform (AirWatch). AirWatch installs a few other management and security applications (like BitDefender antivirus, for example) on each computer.
We're seeking a monitoring solution that will collect data from AirWatch and the other device-management tools and aggregate it for reporting purposes.
Our solution needs to have the following features:
- We will not install any Nagios agents on the endpoints themselves, nor ever directly poll endpoints from Nagios. Rather, Nagios would need to pull data from the SaaS dashboards of the various tools we use, via each dashboard's RESTful API. For example, Nagios would poll the AirWatch administrative dashboard and download a list of all endpoints under management, along with AirWatch's statistics and information for each endpoint. It would do this for the other tools like BitDefender as well. It doesn't need to poll more than once per day.
- When Nagios downloads the API data, it will need to create new records for devices that it hasn't seen before. It will have to determine which device each tool is referring to, since some of our tools identify devices uniquely by their serial numbers, but other tools identify devices uniquely by their hostnames.
- After all devices are recognized, Nagios will alert on specific conditions that are reported by each tool.
- We will need to export (to CSV or Excel) custom reports of the information for the device fleet.
- The I.T. manager of each department will want to log into Nagios to see their department's devices, alerts, and most recent data. Each manager will need a read-only account and a customized visualization that only shows them specific slices of the data that Nagios is tracking; we do not want to expose all data fields.
- Finally, ideally we would like to white-label the interface to remove Nagios branding. This is optional.
After researching Nagios, I'm not sure it's the right platform for our use case, primarily because we will not be polling devices directly, but rather aggregating data from management dashboards via each dashboard's RESTful API.
Am I right that Nagios is not the best tool? If not, do you have other recommendations?
Thank you!
Please help me determine whether Nagios is the right platform for my monitoring needs. Here's the use case:
We manage thousands of end-user endpoints (computers, phones, and tablets) globally using a Mobile Device Management platform (AirWatch). AirWatch installs a few other management and security applications (like BitDefender antivirus, for example) on each computer.
We're seeking a monitoring solution that will collect data from AirWatch and the other device-management tools and aggregate it for reporting purposes.
Our solution needs to have the following features:
- We will not install any Nagios agents on the endpoints themselves, nor ever directly poll endpoints from Nagios. Rather, Nagios would need to pull data from the SaaS dashboards of the various tools we use, via each dashboard's RESTful API. For example, Nagios would poll the AirWatch administrative dashboard and download a list of all endpoints under management, along with AirWatch's statistics and information for each endpoint. It would do this for the other tools like BitDefender as well. It doesn't need to poll more than once per day.
- When Nagios downloads the API data, it will need to create new records for devices that it hasn't seen before. It will have to determine which device each tool is referring to, since some of our tools identify devices uniquely by their serial numbers, but other tools identify devices uniquely by their hostnames.
- After all devices are recognized, Nagios will alert on specific conditions that are reported by each tool.
- We will need to export (to CSV or Excel) custom reports of the information for the device fleet.
- The I.T. manager of each department will want to log into Nagios to see their department's devices, alerts, and most recent data. Each manager will need a read-only account and a customized visualization that only shows them specific slices of the data that Nagios is tracking; we do not want to expose all data fields.
- Finally, ideally we would like to white-label the interface to remove Nagios branding. This is optional.
After researching Nagios, I'm not sure it's the right platform for our use case, primarily because we will not be polling devices directly, but rather aggregating data from management dashboards via each dashboard's RESTful API.
Am I right that Nagios is not the best tool? If not, do you have other recommendations?
Thank you!