Thruk – A MKLivestatus webinterface

Thruk is a Webinterface for Nagios. The Nagios Webinterface called Thruk is the second Nagios Addon based on MKLivestatus. You will ask “Why yet another webinterface?”. The difference to all the other new Nagios Webinterfaces is in the focuses and goals of Thruk.

A short refresher: MKLivestatus

MKLivestatus is a new Nagios Event Broker Module which serves the current status information of Nagios to 3rd party addons without bringing overhead like a database with it.

Thruk in short

The Thruk Webinterface for Nagios has been created to get a more flexible and faster Webinterface than the current CGI based Nagios Webinterface. Thruk can combine the status information of several Nagios Servers using them as multiple backends. This is possible when using MKLivestatus with a TCP socket to make it reachable from the Network.

A short list of benefits comparing Thruk to the old CGIs:

• It’s fast
• It’s live (No wait for Nagios status.dat refresh)
• Simple HTML, No fancy JavaScript
• No database needed
• Connects multiple Nagios instances

Goals of Thruk

The focus of Thruk is not to create another fancy Web 2.0 Webinterface for Nagios. It simply adapted the HTML code of Nagios while fixing some validation problems. To the user the interface looks same as the old CGI based Webinterface. This has the advantage that no user needs to lern how to handle the new Webinterface.

A big advantage of the new Webinterface can be: If you are using distributed monitoring and forward all status information from your distributed monitoring systems to a central host just for having a central visualization you can break up with that now. It may be annoying to produce such load just for visualizing things. Using NagVis and Thruk you could totally remove that automatic synchronisation of status information. You could simply connect the visualisation addons to all your Nagios servers for collecting the status information on demand.
Combining several Nagios instances on the visualization layer is a big benefit of Thruk and will be an important feature for the other Nagios Webinterfaces to realize in the near future.

Developement

Thruk is written in Perl with the Catalyst module. Cause of the architecture Thruk can be installed on any webserver which supports perl. There is no need to install Thruk on the same host as Nagios. Thruk can connect to one or more Nagios instances using MKLivestatus with a TCP socket over the network.

Sven Nierlein is working on Thruk since less than two month. There is no official release yet but there is a lot of activity. It seems we don’t need to wait much time for an official release.

Thruk is hosted on Github. Installation instructions can be found on the Demo instance of Thruk.