Ninja – The alternative Nagios GUI

Ninja is a new webinterface for Nagios. Ninja is the first project which intended to create the new Nagios GUI to replace the existing CGIs completely.

The project has the activity, power and relations to bring that task to success. Maybe someday Ninja will be included within the official Nagios package. But it seems this will still take some time. The current version of Ninja is 0.3.6.

The benefits

Ninja solves different requirements which could not be solved by the CGI based webinterface of Nagios. The Ninja GUI is written in PHP which results in a wider flexibility and a bigger community to contribute to the project. Ninja is template based which makes it easy to change the style of the GUI to fit corporate standards. There is also multilanguage support which may help some users in multi lingual environments.

The Ninja frontend intends to be much more scalable to work well in very large environments where the CGIs are unusable. The Ninja team has an eye on easy integration of 3rd party addons for Nagios like pnp4nagios, NagVis and so on.

During the developement of Ninja the developers started working on extending the NagVis project with the geomap which is a new Google maps based way of viualizing objects. The geomap is based on Flash Flex and part of the official NagVis package.

Connecting Nagios and Ninja

Ninja uses the Merlin MySQL Database as default information source. The initial target of Merlin was to make the setup of distributed Nagios installations easier. Seeing the Merlin Database can easily be used for simple connections of 3rd party applications to Nagios in even single seated Nagios installations the developers decided to use it as default status information backend for Ninja.

You only need a MySQL database to setup the Merlin MySQL Database for Ninja. The setup is like for the NDO. You need to setup the Merlin MySQL Database, add a Nagios Event Broker module to the Nagios process, start the Merlin Daemon (merlind) and enjoy it.

Developement

The Open Source project has been started and is powered by op5. op5 is a Swedish IT company which focuses on Open Source IT monitoring. They release a lot of their programs and solutions as Open Source and create benefits for other users. The platform for such releases is op5.org.

You can take a look at the Ninja webinterface on the demo page. You can access it with the user and password: monitor.