General questions

This support forum board is for support questions relating to Nagios Log Server, our solution for managing and monitoring critical log data.
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WillemDH
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General questions

Post by WillemDH »

Hello,

Today I heard I'm involved in some European City's projects to do something with cycling and statistical data. Several idea were put on the tables, some of them involved putting sensors on 500 student bikes, placing sensors on busy traffic points etc. The info these sensor would gather would be stored in an Excell of which they wanted to make an Excell graph.....

I guess you hear me coming... So i showed these project leaders some nice graphs generated with Nagios Log Server and they were quite impressed. The idea would be to make the sensors sent information over gprs to a Nagios Log Server setup. I can see myself do the above, no issues, but then the more specific questions were raised and I hope Nagios support can anser some of these.

Can specific graphs in Nagios Log Server somehow be exported or made available on a different website then NLS itself?
What about making a NLS available to the Internet? Are there some recommendations about this? All the data that would be sent to this NLS setup can be considered 'safe', so there is no critical info, but are there other things to consider when making the NLS available to the Internet?
Can the logo of Nagios Log Server be replaced with a custom logo?
Would there be some way to only show one dashboard on the 'homepage' without logging in? (aka the backend api tokens in XI)
Can the data sent to the NLS be exported again? In what format would this be?
I know there are world and European geographic maps. Is there a way to use a custom map of a European city?

Grtz and thanks for any guidance you can give me. If the project is validated, it could imply us buying several new NLS nodes for a separate setup.

Willem
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scottwilkerson
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Re: General questions

Post by scottwilkerson »

WillemDH wrote:Can specific graphs in Nagios Log Server somehow be exported or made available on a different website then NLS itself?
Not at this time, however the data that populates the graphs is available, you can see the call that was made by clicking the "i" Inspect icon on the graph.

We have on the roadmap a concept of making these items available using an API key however you would want to keep this from being exposed to the public.
WillemDH wrote:What about making a NLS available to the Internet? Are there some recommendations about this? All the data that would be sent to this NLS setup can be considered 'safe', so there is no critical info, but are there other things to consider when making the NLS available to the Internet?
This shouldn't be a problem (specifically if no sensitive data was being sent via logs), again, you wouldn't want to make any API keys are exposed.
WillemDH wrote:Would there be some way to only show one dashboard on the 'homepage' without logging in? (aka the backend api tokens in XI)
Again, on the roadmap but working out implications to make sure data cannot get exposed.
WillemDH wrote:Can the data sent to the NLS be exported again? In what format would this be?
Yes, with an API key a user can get any of the data, it would be in JSON format, you can click the "i" Inspect icon on any of the elements on the dashboard to see how the data is pulled.
WillemDH wrote:I know there are world and European geographic maps. Is there a way to use a custom map of a European city?
There really isn't a way to use custom maps at this time. Theoretically a new kibana panel could be made but it would need to have all the geo coordinates in the map for the picture.
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WillemDH
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Re: General questions

Post by WillemDH »

What about making a NLS available to the Internet? Are there some recommendations about this? All the data that would be sent to this NLS setup can be considered 'safe', so there is no critical info, but are there other things to consider when making the NLS available to the Internet?

This shouldn't be a problem (specifically if no sensitive data was being sent via logs), again, you wouldn't want to make any API keys are exposed.
If we would expose an NLS to the Internet with default settings and would provide a user (non-admin) which can be used publicly, this user has no way to retrieve ani api keys you are talking about?
WillemDH wrote:
Can the data sent to the NLS be exported again? In what format would this be?

Yes, with an API key a user can get any of the data, it would be in JSON format, you can click the "i" Inspect icon on any of the elements on the dashboard to see how the data is pulled.
So theoritcally it should be possible to use highcharts to show a similar graph on another website? http://www.highcharts.com/docs/working- ... ocessing#3

Thanks for all this information Scott.
Last edited by WillemDH on Fri Mar 27, 2015 8:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
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scottwilkerson
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Re: General questions

Post by scottwilkerson »

WillemDH wrote:If we would expose an NLS to the Internet with default settings and would provide a user (non-admin) which can be used publicly, this use has no way to retrieve ani api keys you are talking about?
Theoretically, correct, however there are going to be considerations to think about such as what if someone logged in changes the password of the account. I like the idea and where you are taking the product, but to be honest, I haven't spent a ton of time thinking of all the possible implications.
WillemDH wrote:So theoritcally it should be possible to use highcharts to show a similar graph on another website? http://www.highcharts.com/docs/working- ... ocessing#3
Correct. And as you know, highcharts is well regarded and easy to work with. It usually is our goto for charting and graphing along with the d3 library. What I would suggest to someone looking to accomplish this would be to pull the JSON using PHP, do any post processing of the data, and have php write out the relevant javascript for highcharts to process. this way the API key would be contained in the PHP script and not exposed, and you can take the results you get and parse them into a highcharts ready format.
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WillemDH
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Re: General questions

Post by WillemDH »

Scott,

Well, we will only know in November is the project is validated. So if you would find some time to think about possible implications by then, I'd be happy to learn about them.

And tx for the info on highcharts.

Grtz

WIllem
Nagios XI 5.8.1
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scottwilkerson
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Re: General questions

Post by scottwilkerson »

No problem, I will let you know if I come up with anything else I haven't said already.
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