Nagios Business Process Intelligence

Nagios 2012 provides a lot of significant changes to the interface. One of those large changes is to the Business Process Intelligence which allows you to set up checks based on groups of services and hosts that support one business application. BPI version 2 is a complete reconfiguration of BPI which is more intuitive and better integrated.

In order to use BPI select the “Create New BPI Group”. Create a "Group ID" for the group and make sure there are no spaces. The "Display Name" can have spaces. Add a description.

You will need to decide if the group is a "Primary" group, meaning it will be top level. If you uncheck the primary setting this group can be nested under another group. New in version 2 are "Health Thresholds" which allow you to set percentages to create Warning or Critical states. The "Priority" Level will place the group in the appropriate tab.

Now select all of the services and hosts which create the group and then click “Add Members”.

This will create the basic outline. Now you need to select which members are essential. In other words, if this member does not work then the group does not function. For example, with a mail server that the users login and retrieve mail via IMAP then there are essential elements to that process. The Dovecot daemon must allow authentication to the IMAP and the Postfix mail server daemons must be running. These as well as the host must be up become essential to the function of the IMAP access.

Select the essential members and then write the configuration. Here you can see that members like POP3 access are features of the mail server but it is not essential so not marked essential. Other elements like CPU usage and memory are components but likely not essential either.

This then creates a product that the administrator can use to verify that a service can be provided to the company.

Using BPI allows an administrator to present business processes in ways that often make more sense to the company.