About the Nagios XML Engine

* Serve Nagios status data as XML.

* Aggregate data from multiple Nagios instances.

* Issue commands to Nagios via XML methods.

* Transform Nagios data into HTML, PDF, Word or Excel using XSLT.

* Runs on any Perl enabled system. Unix or Win32.

* Can be accessed via the XML-RPC protocol, HTTP GET (URL), or command line.

* Full SOAP 1.1 compliance.

* XML based creation & editing of Nagios configuration files.

* Object oriented interface will allow queries of specific services or hosts.

* Nagios 2.0 support using the new Nagios daemon interface.

* A schema to compliment the current DTD.

* Stand alone daemon mode.

The Nagios XML Engine (NXE for short) is an XML based processing layer for the Open Source Nagios scheduling & monitoring platform. NXE provides an XML interface for the most critical aspects of managing and reporting on your Nagios infrastructure via a standard and consistent XML format.

NXE will report the status of one or more Nagios systems as XML, it will allow you to transform the status XML using XSLT stylesheets to the format of your choice and NXE will process and create Nagios external commands on your behalf allowing you to control operations of your Nagios system via standard XML interfaces.

The Nagios XML Engine was produced to address several issues that are common on networks running the Nagios system. First and foremost of these is the issue of data integration between Nagios and other corporate systems. XML is rapidly becoming the "de facto" data encapsulation method in corporate IT environments. It is used extensively to transfer data from one system to another and many of the emerging network resource access protocols are based on XML data transmission. SOAP, XML-RPC and even standard web served HTML are examples of this emerging trend. While Nagios is perhaps the most advanced monitoring and scheduling platform available, it does not provide built in support for any XML interface.

NXE is designed to address these data integration concerns by allowing Nagios to be fully integrated with any XML capable platform. Many intranet, extranet and web based application platforms (such as Microsoft's IIS/.Net servers, IBM's Domino & Websphere and Apache's SOAP, Xerces & Xalan projects to name a few) use XML as their core data structures and NXE allows Nagios to be integrated with all of them for both reporting and control (via Nagios' external command interface) of multiple Nagios systems.

NXE's inclusion of an XSLT transformation engine means that you can convert Nagios data to any conceivable format by simply creating a new XSLT style sheet. XSLT style sheets can also be used to perform complex data reporting functions such as aggregating results from many separate Nagios hosts or even transforming Nagios data into an Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word/Excel file. The included sample XSLT style sheet demonstrates how a fully functional custom Web interface for Nagios could be built using nothing more then NXE and some XSLT stylesheets.

NXE was designed for maximum flexibility at run time. This means that you can specify almost all the settings of the data returned by NXE when you call it. You can always specify which instances of Nagios to report from or send commands to or which style sheet you would like to use to transform the results when you call NXE. This is true whether you are using the URL (HTTP GET), XML-RPC or command line modes of execution.

NXE is a Perl based application that works on both Win32 & Unix platforms. NXE can be run from the command line or used as a CGI with any Perl compatible Web server. When installed as a CGI, NXE can be accessed via standard HTTP GET commands or XML-RPC. An XML-RPC client (written in Perl) is included in the NXE package and can be run from any Win32 or Unix computer with appropriate network access to the NXE CGI.