Network Monitoring with Nagios

Using the Web Interface

Once the cgi.cfg configuration file is created and you are logged in with proper http authentication, you will be presented with the Nagios web interface. If you are logged in with a username that matches a contact in your Nagios configuration files, you will be presented with information that pertains only to those hostgroups, hosts, and services that you are a valid contact for. If you are not a valid contact in the Nagios configuration files, and you are not set as a user that is authorized_for_all_services or authorized_for_all_hosts in the cgi.cfg file, then you will receive an error that you do not have access to any information.

There are many destinations in the web interface that provide a great deal of information; however, they are all well described in the Nagios documentation. What we will do instead is cover some common scenarios that occur and how you would interact with Nagios as a result.

Warning

The Nagios web interface is written as a C-based CGI application. It is because of this implementation that it does not have the idea of “application-stat.e” It means that with each request of the web interface, it has completely forgotten what it previously did. Furthermore, with each request, the CGI application has to completely re-read Nagios’s configuration files and status data. With Nagios 1.x, the web interface parsed the configuration files and the status files. With Nagios 2.x, the process has improved somewhat in which the interface ...