Nagios XI - Manual Installation Instructions

Target Audience

This document is intended for use by Nagios Authorized Resellers and other Nagios Partners who wish to install Nagios XI on physical servers, operating systems and distributions other than those provided as our official offerings.

Platform Support

As of the time of writing, Nagios Enterprises is only able to officially provide support for installing Nagios XI on the following Linux distributions for both, 32 and 64 bit installations:

RHEL 6/7 (requires RHN registration)
CentOS 6/7

If you discover bugs or have fixes for installing Nagios XI on other platforms, please let us know. We will do our best to incorporate your improvements to expand support for additional platforms in future Nagios XI releases, which will make future installation processes smoother for you and your clients.

Installation Prerequisites

Important: Nagios Enterprises highly recommends and will only support installing Nagios XI on a newly installed, “clean” system (a bare minimal install with nothing else installed or configured).

Attempting to install Nagios XI on a pre-existing system with other applications already installed can cause the Nagios XI installation process to fail, critical system components and settings (e.g. database servers) to be modified in a way that negatively affects other applications, and previously installed applications to be automatically upgraded or removed. While installing XI on a system with other applications is possible, it is not recommended due to the possible interactions and complexity of multiple components that are required for Nagios XI to function.

If you choose to ignore these warnings, you do so at your own risk.

Internet access is required for installation and upgrades!

Downloading the Latest Release

Make sure to download the Nagios XI installation package to the /tmp directory of the server on which you wish to install it, as shown in the following commands:

Type:

cd /tmp

To download the latest stable release, use the following command:

wget http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagiosxi/xi-latest.tar.gz

Installing XI From The Installation Archive

To get started with the installation of Nagios XI you must first expand the installation archive.

If you are installing the latest stable release, use the following command (Adapt as appropriate if you downloaded a different file.):

tar xzf xi-latest.tar.gz

Installation Steps

To get started, change to the newly created /tmp/nagiosxi subdirectory to get started with the installation:

cd /tmp/nagiosxi

Note: Do not install Nagios XI from a directory that does not allow other users to have read/execute permissions to the installation files. Part of the installation requires switch to different user accounts, which need to have access to the installer scripts.

Run the wrapper script:

./fullinstall

This will automatically take care of a number of things for you, including:

Modifying the yum configuration and installing prerequisite packages
Creating required uses and groups
Initializing PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, and set the MySQL root password to 'nagiosxi'
Modifying sudoers and iptables to allow certain commands and traffic
Installing backup scripts for the databases
Adjusting PHP settings and installing the SourceGuardian PHP loaders for encrypted files
Compiling and installing various components, including Nagios Core, the plugins, NDOUtils, PNP, webinject, etc.
Installing the Nagios XI scripts and PHP files in /usr/local/nagiosxi
Installing cron jobs for the root and nagios users
Setting appropriate services to start in runlevels 3 and 5 and starting them now
Importing base object definitions (templates, commands, etc.) into NagiosQL for use with Nagios Core
Installing a welcome page in the root webserver directory /var/www/html

Watch for error messages when running this command, as some installation scripts may fail if system requirements are missing, or operating system command names or application paths differ from those currently supported.

Finishing Up

If the installation commands completed successfully, you should now have a fully functioning Nagios XI system!

You can access the Nagios XI interface by pointing your web browser to:

http://<xiserver>/

where <xiserver> is the IP address of the server you just installed Nagios XI on.

Final Thoughts

For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at:

http://support.nagios.com/forum/