Tip of the Trade: Fruity Nagios

As nice as Nagios is, configuring the beast has driven many a network administrator to drink and premature hair loss. If you’re in the mood for something a little sleeker and a little easier, give the Fruity configuration tool a try. Like everything else these days, Fruity is a PHP-based HTTP configuration front-end to Nagios.
Fruity, a PHP-based HTTP configuration front-end, helps Nagios taste better.

With Fruity, you can fuss and tweak and configure to your heart’s content without actually changing any Nagios settings. It stores its configuration in an internal MySQL database until you are satisfied with the configuration. Then, you export it to Nagios. Like all well-behaved graphical configuration tools, Fruity has a direct relationship with Nagios’ configuration files, so you can switch between using Fruity and editing the files directly without making a mess.

Fruity is nicely organized and makes it much easier to visualize relationships between network objects and to find the pertinent configurations for specific devices. The larger the network, the more you’ll appreciate the sanity of Fruity’s layout.

Fruity is free of cost and free software, supported by the nice folks at Groundwork and licensed under the GPL. The current release is 1-0.rc2, and the maintainers warn it is not ready for production systems yet. I have it on a couple of small networks and haven’t had any problems, but wise admins will listen to the people who work on it. It doesn’t seem to be in any Linux distributions yet, so you’ll have to install it from sources. To use Fruity, you’ll need:

• An HTTP server
• PHP 5
• PHP MySQL Extension
• PHP Session Extension
• MySQL 4.1.
• Nagios v2.0

It doesn’t work with Nagios 1.0, but it will import your configurations for migrating to Nagios 2.0.

This articlke was originally published May 15, 2007.