Nagios server sees. To see the current data, you have to hit the refresh button, and it's annoying. If I start iNag, it is a reasonable assumption that as part of that, I want it to talk to my Nagios server, and not make me hit "refresh/reload" just to get initial data. This pattern repeats throughout the application, and it just adds a thin layer of annoyance to things. However, once you hit refresh, you see a nice tactical display that gives you the overall status of what Nagios is monitoring at a glance, as shown to the right.
I scrolled down a bit to show the services more clearly. What's cut off are the number of Ok hosts. However, the overall display is clear. You can see the status of both hosts and servers. (In Nagios-speak, a host is a device on the network, and services run on a device). If you tap on the "Warning" section in Services, you're taken to a display that more clearly tells you what the problem(s) are:
This page shows each problem service categorized by host. If you tap on one of the entries here, you get taken to a detail screen for that service:
In this case, the problem with the ping service for that host resolved itself by the time I got to this screen. The nice thing with iNag is that it worked how I expected it to. Tapping on an item showed me more detail on that item if it was available.
iNag can also show you a list of all the hosts in Nagios, as shown on the right.
Notice that this only gives you the host status, not the status of any services on the host. This brings me to my second annoyance with iNag: No support for Nagios hostgroups. Nagios lets you create hostgroups to organize your hosts in. That let you apply services to groups, rather than individual computers. It's much easier to create an LDAP service check and add a "LDAP Servers" group once, then add multiple individual servers every time you create a new service. Hostgroups also aid in visually organizing things in Nagios. As you can see here, even though I only have 60 hosts, trying to see each one in the Hosts display is going to require a lot of flick-scrolling. Considering that a large Nagios install might have hundreds or even thousands of servers, the need for iNag to support hostgroups in the hosts display becomes apparent.
Services are somewhat better, in that they're organized by host (pictured right), but having each host's list of services be expandable/hide-able or supporting Nagios servicegroups would be a big help, usability-wise.
I'd like an option to organize services by either service name or host. If I have ten Web servers, I'm more interested in the status of those services in one quick glance, than scrolling from server to server to look at one service on each. I'd also like to be able to refresh a view from either the Hosts or Services views, instead of just the Tactical and Event Log views.
iNag lets you view the Nagios event log, but just like iNag's tactical display doesn't show you real data until you refresh at least once, iNag's event log display is blank until you refresh at least once.
Here's a look at the display before you refresh:
And here's what it look like after you refresh:
None of the issues I have with iNag keep it from being useful and worth the money, but they just create annoyances that shouldn't be there. One other annoyance is that iNag doesn't allow you to remotely restart or halt Nagios, nor does it allow you to modify the settings for a given host
Macworld's buying advice
If you are running Nagios on your network, have an iPhone or iPod touch, and need to be able to talk to Nagios from those devices, iNag is a no-brainer at $15.
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