Tag Archives: ipad

OnCall for Nagios app

UPDATE AS OF OCTOBER 10, 2017: This app is no longer supported in IOS 11 and it appears that the author has abandoned the project.

I recently purchased this iPhone app for my iPad and iPhone in hopes that it would glean information out of Nagios and provide a clean, easy-to-use, summary.  It did exactly that.

However, there are a few good things and a few not-so-good things you should know.

The app was designed with the iPhone in mind.  If you’ve ever tried to acknowledge an alert using Safari on your iPhone, you know how tricky it can be.  It involves several steps and an incredibly small user interface which frequently gets fat fingered .  OnCall for Nagios solves that.  It provides a concise summary of all network issues and allows you to filter issue types to see only what matters to you at that moment.  It also provides detailed information about individual problems and allows for quick and easy acknowledgement, rescheduling of the next check and even the scheduling of downtime.

Some things that I feel could have been done better are the documentation, FAQ and the support pages, which are pretty much non-existent.  There is a support page, but it contains nothing more than email address to email the app author for support.  Luckily, the app is very intuitive and easy to configure, so this is not too much of an issue.  There is however one configuration gotcha.

When I configured the application initially, I was asked for the URL, but I wasn’t sure which URL it wanted; the URL in which I access Nagios from the web or the true path to the cgi-bin.  It turns out that it is the cgi-bin path that it wants.  Because this was ambiguous and because there is a lack of documentation, as mentioned previously, I had to email the author.  I first reached out to him at 8:30pm on a Saturday night.  I figured I would receive a reply sometime on Monday.  Wrong.  He replied in less than 30 minutes and quickly pointed me in the right direction with regards to the URL.  He was also very pleasant.

Something I would love to see is a version for the iPad.  Because it is an iPhone app, it’s actually better to use Safari on your iPad.

Pros: easy to navigate, easy to use, easy to configure, inexpensive, good support

Cons: lack of documentation, no iPad support

In conclusion, if you are using Nagios and an iPhone, this app is a must.  The not-so-great issues are small.  The upside is big.  Definitely worth the money.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oncall-for-nagios/id431794127