Nagios XI: Some Tricks

I have been playing with Nagios XI since last week. Here are some tricks I have found so far:

1) The default root password is nagiosxi. The default root password for the Nagios XI VMware virtual appliance is nagiosxi, which can be found on the login screen.

2) ‘$’ is considered as an illegal character. Some interfaces of our routers contains $ in their names, like $Outside$. Nagios XI keeps the interface name as the service description (service_description) in the service configuration file when I use the router/switch monitor wizard to add those routers into monitor list. After that, I found my Nagios crashed. I did some analysis and removed the $ from the service_description, then Nagios was back to work again.

3) Performance graphs are missing. The issue disappeared after I reset the security crendential. You can also try these solutions.

4) Failed to login Nagios core manager. As the Nagios XI and Nagios Core use different credentials to allow multi-tenant capabilities. Reset the security credential for Nagios core manager.

5) No data shows on bandwidth graphs. This one took me a while to figure it out, in my case I did the following two to fix it.

• Use SNMP Version 1 when adding switch/router by following the monitor wizard
• Modify the /etc/cron.d/mrtg file to change ‘0-59/5 * * * * root /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg’ to ‘0-59/5 * * * * root env LANG=C /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg’