Performance Graphs for Nagios with nagiosgraph

Project Notes

For us, Nagiosgraph is the most important extension to our monitoring system. Before Nagiosgraph, we had been relying entirely on Cacti for performance monitoring. With the implementation of Nagiosgraph in 2008, Nagios itself is now covering most of the performance graphing itself. We benefit from this integration through quick lookups of historic performance data in one single system. No more additional login into a second application, no more manual search and mapping of devices between Nagios and Cacti. We still retain Cacti, but it lost most of its importance.

Why bother with Nagiosgraph when there are other packages out? Nagiosgraph integrates with Nagios while still being fully independend of it. It is written in Perl so fixing is easily possible. It doesn't need a database and handles everything in files. New graphs are generated automatically if a map entry exists. We do not need to define new systems or services in nagiosgraph, a huge time saver. Today, Nagiosgraph running unchanged since 2008, easily handles 1500+ active devices with a total of over 4000 individual graphs while it is entirely 'maintenance-free'.