Like many network administrators, I use Nagios to monitor my network. Nagios is an open-source network monitoring system that uses SNMP, Perl, and other languages to monitor your network, with a Web UI for viewing the current state of your network and the devices within. While Nagios has a simple HTML-based interface, it's rather kludgy to view on an iPhone. There have been some attempts to create a Web app front-end for the iPhone, but, up to this point, they've been overly complicated and tedious to set up.
iNag, from John Fullington, is a native iPhone app that can talk to an existing Nagios system without a complicated setup. It does solid job of giving you the information you need in a clear, concise manner. It's not perfect, certainly, but it's not missing much. iNag costs $15 in the App Store, and in my use thus far, I've definitely gotten my money's worth.
Setup
Setting up iNag is a two-step process. The first part is buying and downloading the app itself from the iTunes Apple Store. Once that's done, you have to download a separate PHP file that acts as an interface between iNag and your Nagios server. (Just to be clear: You have to have an existing Nagios server to use iNag. iNag is not a network monitoring server by itself, it is a front end to an existing Nagios server. If you're not using Nagios, iNag will be of no use to you at all.)
There's a small amount of customization you have to do to the PHP data feeder file, (inag.php) to set it up for use. First, you have to tell inag.php the paths to your Nagios status file, external command file, and your log file. (If you're somewhat new to Nagios, the paths to these are in the nagios.cfg file in /etc in your nagios base directory.) You should use the full path, not just the relative path, since depending on how you installed it, the base Nagios directory may not be the standard /usr/local/nagios/ tree.
Once that's done, you have to set up read-only and read/write values, for the $ROkey and $RWkey variables. In the current version of iNag, "read/write" only lets you acknowledge problems. You can't actually modify or even restart Nagios from iNag as of yet, so unless you use the problem acknowledgment function, the $ROkey variable is all you'll need. You then copy inag.php into the directory where the HTML files used by Nagios are. I just copied it into the Nagios root web directory, for convenience sake.
Next, you configure iNag's settings on the iPhone. iNag's settings are pretty straightforward. It needs the full URL to the inag.php file, the value for either $ROkey or $RWkey, and the user name and password you'll be using to log into Nagios with iNag, as in the screenshot to the right:
Stern security warning: I highly recommend that you only use HTTPS to talk to Nagios, whether with iNag, or a "regular" Web browser. Depending on how your system is set up, Nagios can give an attacker a wealth of information about what's on your network, what services you're running on your network, and a logical map of your network. While there is encryption support in SNMPv3, there are a lot of platforms out there, such as switches, most printers, wireless access points, routers, and Windows that do not support SNMPv3. Many of the Nagios plugins don't encrypt their data either. If you're connecting to Nagios via an unencrypted connection, and someone manages to tap into that, you could give that person a ton of information you'd rather they not have.
Using iNag
Once you've got the setup done (it took me about five minutes), start iNag and go. This brings me to what is my major annoyance with the application: when you first start iNag, the initial screen is not necessarily what your
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