The Nagios Tag Cloud

We use the Nagios monitoring system at work (in fact we use four installs of it for physically isolated networks) and while it’s damn useful (and service checks are easy to create or extend) it’s a little lacking in higher level trending and visualisation tools. Well, at least the very old version we run suffers from this.

Thankfully I work for a company that invests time in its core tools. Over the last couple of hackdays I’ve written two small scripts for parsing Nagios logfiles and presenting the information in a different, slightly more grouped way. The first of these is the Nagios TagCloud - which has a very descriptive name :)

When invoked (I typically use nagiosclouds.pl /log/files/*.log > /webdir/nagios_tagcloud.html from a cronjob) it’ll run through the log files and produce a HTML page containing 3 tag clouds, one for host outages, one for service warnings and one for service criticals. Tag clouds don’t suit everyones work style but I came away from running ours with a couple of action points so I think they’re useful enough to glance at once a month.

I should note the perl module that generates the tag cloud is Leon Brocards HTML::TagCloud and the CSS was graciously given to me by Alex Monney after he burned his eyes looking at my first version.