Let’s be honest. Nagios has lots of good things. But it also have bad ones: it stores data in non-indexed text files, executes a compiled CGI, configuration files are unconfortable when adding and removing new machines (mainly removing them)… and mainly: it’s ugly. Maybe ugly is not the word… it’s austere, simple, not attractive.

I don’t give a damn (and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one), because it’s a tool, and it does its work. I’m not here to enjoy watching it, but to warn me when things go wrong, and to explain me why are they going wrong. But in this world, the ones who take decisions and buy things, they frequently look at the appearance, sometimes beyond functionality. Then if you are trying to convince someone to use nagios, you’ll have more chances if it was pretty.

Here is where nagios nuvola style comes, to give nagios another look, very different, and to make it nicer (in the full article you’ll find two screenshots so you can compare). It’s made by the same people that made nagiosql, and although it has a nagiosexchange page, the downloadable file there is corrupt (one css is bad, status.css, and it looks very different). I took it from this website, and you can download it here, too.

Installing it couldn’t be easier. You just copy files inside “html” directory inside your nagios. In a debian, for instance, it’s as easy as:

wget http://tomas.cat/blog/sites/default/files/nagios-nuvola-1.0.3.tar_.gz
mkdir nuvola
cd nuvola
tar zxvf ../nagios-nuvola-1.0.3.tar_.gz
cp -a html/* /usr/share/nagios3/htdocs/
cp -a html/stylesheets/* /etc/nagios3/stylesheets/.


And that’s it, you got your look-improved nagios!

That’s how “original” nagios looks:

That’s how it looks with its face changed: