A number of months ago, I found myself working on a very large Nagios installation – 2000 hosts, 3300+ service checks, and that was just the beginning. Looking at what had been improved from Nagios 1.4 (which was the older version that was running and needed to be upgraded) and Nagios 3.2, the new shiny version, I saw a lot of under-the-hood kind of changes that are well appreciated, in terms of performance and scalability, but very little that would make an end user even slightly interested in the upgrade. The web interface is straight out of 1998 – using frames and compiled C code to drive CGIs. The database backend had been pulled out and made into a standalone product called NDOUtils, which was still listed as beta, and hadn’t received an update in over 2 years.

In short the primary Nagios developer had slowed down on the end user stuff – probably busy with other things. Today, I found out what those other things are, and I’m not sure I’m pleased. He has announced a commercial, closed-source front end called Nagios XI, that purports to fix a lot of the problems the community wants fixed. It looks like he’s been working with other projects (like pnp4nagios) to make Nagios XI similar to Zenoss or Groundworks – an better integrated monitoring, reporting and analytical platform.

What amuses me is that earlier this year, a number of independent developers became tired with the slow progress on Nagios, and forked the whole project. The name of the fork is Icinga, which is by design unpronounceable. They have already added Oracle databases as a supported backend, and fixed a number of long standing ndo2db problems. They are also close to releasing an AJAX-y web front end. All open source, and they are encouraging community involvement.

To be entirely honest, at this point, the next time I’m planning a major system upgrade, I’m going to look long and hard at Icing’s project. My predecessor had already abstracted away all the crummy web-UI for the Nagios, and I’m extending that as best I can. It looks like the Icing project has my priorities closer to heart than the ‘core’ Nagios developers. We’ll have to see how it shakes out.