Sageo – A new web interface proof of concept for Nagios and Shinken based systems

Sageo is the technical building blocks for a new Livestatus based UI. It is up on gihub, under the project name smlacombe/sageo.

3 different systems could benefit from using or extending Sageo : Check_mk Multisite, Adagios, Shinken WebUI.

The first (Multisite) because, it is running up to an architecture and maintainability dead-end. Multisite is now a fairly large and mature UI covering configuration (WATO), events, status views, magvis integration, a nice client architecture. Sageo could give a boost to the Multisite German developers to update the web UI to a modern backend. UPDATE: They have no interest, oh well, their loss.

For Adagios, its status views are rudimentary and statically built, they would greatly benefit from using the Sageo view engine.

Adagios, has the most future potential of all the UIs. It has good technology, good looks, a great Nagios configuration file parser named pynag, it has support for something similar to Shinken Packs and finally it has a configuration UI. This last piece is what Shinken is currently missing. UPDATE: pynag will shortly support Shinken configuration files and multiple configuration sources (for same hosts and services!). Exciting stuff.

Looking glass to the future

Why is this project exciting? A modern UI with good plumbing focused on bringing real usability and flexibility to monitoring.

  • Top rate tabular status views (rewritten based on check_mk Multisite)
  • Sidebar with snapins (rewritten based on check_mk Multisite)
  • Support for multiple Livestatus sources
  • Planned native Graphite integration
  • MVC programming
  • Python based, Flask framework
  • Support for Livestatus extensions

I can envision great things from this UI that are complimentary to an event backend and a graph backend. The Graphing backend should be Graphite and the event backend could be (Splunk, ElasticSearch, Logstatsh)

What Sageo can bring to an existing project is :

  • Status views
  • Performance data
  • Multi source dashboards

The proof is in the pudding. How to bring this together takes an understanding of the monitoring space and what works and what doesn’t. If an opportunity for bringing much needed clarity was not there, this project would not have seen the light. The main Sageo developer has brought together a good base to move forward, the UI as it stands is fully functional.

Also notice what is excluded; configuration management, event log consoles, reporting engines, discovery management. Sageo is not everything to everyone, it is a technical proof of concept.

What next

smlacombe has written a comprehensive intro to extend the current status view feature set.

The technology will be proposed to the Adagios team.

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