nagiosXML

Project Notes

The purpose of nagiosXML is to create structured, up-to-date network diagrams directly from Nagios configuration files. nagiosXML is a Java utility program that reads Nagios configuration files and produces specially formatted XML files. In turn, the XML files can be diagrammed using readily available XML diagramming programs such as DrawTag.

What makes this useful? Maintaining network diagrams is a perennial documentation problem. Tools like Visio produce attractive diagrams, but they are hard to maintain. Nagios provides up-to-date diagrams, but unfortunately they are difficult to read in large networks.

The nagiosXML approach is to create structured network diagrams, one per hostgroup in the Nagios configuration. Beginning with Nagios 2.0, hostgroups are purely documentation entries. The hostgroups may be defined to show alternate views of the network, e.g. high level or low level, geographic or functional. The resulting network diagrams can be easily regenerated when the Nagios configuration changes.

If you experience problems with nagiosXML, try running it with the -v option and check the messages. If you still have problems, email me at [email protected] and I will try to assist.