$Id: README,v 1.7 2002/06/28 10:12:29 kemuri Exp $ Nagat ================================================================================ (c) Copyright 2002 Ypsilon.Net AG, Germany Nagios and the Nagios logo are trademarks of Ethan Galstad 1. Introduction 2. Installation and configuration 3. Plugin system 4. Support 5. To do 6. Copyright and license 7. Thanks !!! PLEASE REPORT BUGS, DOC IMPROMENTS, THANKS :) !!! 1. Introduction ---------------- Nagat is a configuration tool for Nagios(tm). It is written to be as flexible as possible meaning that the storage of data and export to Nagios depends on the choosen 'plugin'. Main homepage is the project page on Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagat http://nagat.sourceforge.net (screenshots!) 2. Installation and configuration ---------------------------------- 2.1 Download Nagat is available on nagat.sourceforge.net. 2.1 Requirements Nagat requires a webserver (ex. Apache) running PHP. It doesn't need any exotic features such as XML, so a basic installation should do. Installing it on the same server where Nagios is running, is recommented, but not really needed. Backup your configuration first. Nagat doesn't make backups of the files it writes.. yet. Backup your Nagios configuration now! 2.2 Installation Unpack the tar.gz into somewhere into your webroot. For security reasons it is better to put it behind some authentication on a SSL enabled webserver. Some people may notice the 'inc' (include) files in the directory. You can copy them to another location if you want. The only thing to change is the configuration (see next topic). 'local.inc' and 'sticky.inc' can not be moved. They have to be in the webroot of Nagat. 2.3 Configuration Copy local.inc.dist to local.inc and edit it. See comments in this file. There is little to change. Leave sticky.inc alone. The configuration files in /patch/of/nagios/etc/ should be writable by the webserver. This can be a possible security risk, but Nagios should not run on a publically available machien anyway! If you have another plugin than the 'plugin_default.php' then you will have to alter this in the local.inc aswell. I hope there will be more choices than now (only one, the default ;). All done. It should work :) Don't forget to click the 'Import' for loading your Nagios configuration! 5. Plugin system ----------------- The idea behind the small plugin system is that people want to store data in various ways. 5.1 Why in Nagat and not in Nagios? There are some discussions going on in the Nagios community whether Nagios should be capable of reading it's configuration from a database. This will sure make Nagios easier to configure, but it will take valuable development time away. Nagios is about using a configuration and monitoring. Well, that my opinion. With Nagat I want to give the users a choice. They can edit data stored and read from databases source like MySQL, Postgre, anything PHP supports. Nagat will then Export this data to a readable format Nagios can read. 5.2 Default plugin 'plugin_default.php' is the default Nagat plugin containing functions used for reading and writing configuration to and from Nagios, but also to external location. Nagat will save by default to a file containing serialized data as provided by the PHP function serialize(). 5.3 Basic functions Writing to Nagios can be done in the old and new fashion being the template based system. The function for reading/writing these configuration files should always be there in the plugin. Maybe some will have better identing and stuff like that. 5.4 Writing your own plugin It's important that the function you write in your plugin accept the same arguments and return the same values. The documentation for this will come later, but take a look at 'plugin_default.php'. There are comments and it should be clear from the code what they do. Please feel free to ask me direct question about writing plugins! 4. Support ----------- Nagat is made to be easy and self explaining. Also, it is better to try configuring Nagios by hand so you know it well before using this configuration tool. We can not individually support people nor companies. Therefor, the forums and tracking tools are setup on sourceforge.net. Don't mail the author directly for support please. 5. To do --------- Bring it on! (see also TODO) If you have ideas, use the forums. 6. Copyright, author and license --------------------------------- (c) Copyright 2002 Ypsilon.Net AG, Germany Nagios and the Nagios logo are trademarks of Ethan Galstad Author: Geert Vanderkelen <geert@kemuri.org> Nagat comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details see GNU General Public License (GPL). This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see GNU General Public License for details. 7. Thanks to ------------- o Ethan Galstad et al for making Nagios. o Phil Dawes for sending patches and becoming a Nagat developer! o many others and many others to come reporting stuff :)
