Introduction
Prev | Chapter 1. The Beginning | Next

## Introduction

### Purpose

The NDOUTILS addon is designed to store all configuration and event data from Nagios in a database. Storing information from Nagios in a database will allow for quicker retrieval and processing of that data and will help serve as a foundation for the development of a new PHP-based web interface in future Nagios versions.

MySQL databases are currently supported by the addon. Other databases will be supported in the next versions.

The development for this will start right after the next stable NDOUtils release (1.6).

Support for other database servers may be added if there is sufficient user interest and even more user who are interested in testing.

### Design Overview

The NDOUTILS addon was designed to work for users who have:

- Single Nagios installations

- Multiple standalone or "vanilla" Nagios installations

- Multiple Nagios installations in distributed, redundant, and/or fail over environments

Data from each Nagios process (hereafter referred to as "instances") can be stored either in the same database or different databases than data from other Nagios instances.

Figure 1.1. Possible Designs

Although not yet supported, future development should allow for data from any given Nagios instance to be stored in multiple databases if desired.

Figure 1.2. Future development: One Instance, multiple databases

### Instances

Each Nagios process, whether it is a standalone monitoring server, or part of a distributed, redundant, or fail over monitoring setup, is referred to as an "instance". In order to maintain the integrity of stored data, each Nagios instance must be labeled with a unique identifier or name.

You can choose the name of each Nagios instance to suit your needs. For instance, you could choose to name Nagios instances based on their geographical location...

Figure 1.3. Instance names based on geographical locations

Or you could name Nagios instances based on their purpose...

Figure 1.4. Instance names based on their purpose

How you name Nagios instances is up to you. The key point to remember is that each and every Nagios process must have its own unique instance name.

More information on how instance names come into play will be discussed in sections 3 and 4.

Prev | Up | Next
Chapter 1. The Beginning | Home | What's new in NDOUtils

© 2009 Nagios Development Team, http://www.nagios.org