It's been quite a while since I blogged anything now, and the reason is that I, along with my colleagues here at op5, have been hard at work producing a new GUI for Nagios. Naturally it will be GPL'd, and equally naturally it will be blazing fast, awesomely pretty and contain lots and lots of cool stuff, such as our reporting tool (pretty graphs for the suits), a new flash-based network map (based on RaVis by Google), and the Merlin module.

What with me being the company's die-hard C programmer, I'm naturally taking care of finishing off the Merlin module.

As some of you know, the merlin module was originally designed to be an event transport for effortless redundant and loadbalanced network monitoring. Since modules running inside Nagios have certain restrictions put upon them, we decided to empower the Merlin module with the capabilities to insert events into a database (a rather straightforward patch). The really cool part about it is that Merlin still retains its multiplexing networking capabilities, which means that you can now use Merlin as a (very, very fast) way of communicating Nagios events to other servers.

Since merlin is designed to work with a plethora of different topologies, this means that Nagios will be the easily most scalable network monitoring system of them all. If you want to monitor Google's server-park from a single tool, you'll have to use Nagios. If you want to monitor Second Life's vast and widespread server network, Nagios is the only choice. If you want to monitor the entire internet, Nagios can do that (provided you spend "some" money on hardware ;-))

If you're a handy guy when it comes to doing certificate authentication in C, I might have a job for you though. Currently all nodes have to be configured upstream in its chain of responsibility. The capability to add random servers without modifying the configuration of running servers would be even more awesome