What's New in Version 2.0


Important: Make sure you read through the documentation (especially the FAQs) before sending a question to the mailing lists.

Change Log

The change log for Nagios can be found online at http://www.nagios.org/changelog.php or in the Changelog file in the root directory of the source code distribution.

Known Issues

There is a known issue that can affect Nagios 2.0 on FreeBSD systems. Hopefully this problem can be fixed in a 2.x release...

  1. FreeBSD and threads. On FreeBSD there's a native user-level implementation of threads called 'pthread' and there's also an optional ports collection 'linuxthreads' that uses kernel hooks. Some folks from Yahoo! have reported that using the pthread library causes Nagios to pause under heavy I/O load, causing some service check results to be lost. Switching to linuxthreads seems to help this problem, but not fix it. The lock happens in liblthread's __pthread_acquire() - it can't ever acquire the spinlock. It happens when the main thread forks to execute an active check. On the second fork to create the grandchild, the grandchild is created by fork, but never returns from liblthread's fork wrapper, because it's stuck in __pthread_acquire(). Maybe some FreeBSD users can help out with this problem.

Changes and New Features

  1. Macro Changes - Macros have undergone a major overhaul. You will have to update most of your command definitions to match the new macros. Most macros are now available as environment variables. Also, "on-demand" host and service macros have been added. See the documentation on macros for more information.

  2. Hostgroup Changes
  3. Host Changes
  4. Host Check Changes
  5. Retention Changes
  6. Extended Info Changes
  7. Embedded Perl Changes
  8. Notification Changes
  9. Service Groups Added - Service groups have now been added. They allow you to group services together for display purposes in the CGIs and can be referenced in service dependency and service escalation definitions to make configuration a bit easier.

  10. Triggered Downtime Added - Support for what's called "triggered" downtime has been added for host and service downtime. Triggered downtime allows you to define downtime that should start at the same time another downtime starts (very useful for scheduling downtime for child hosts when the parent host is scheduled for flexible downtime). More information on triggered downtime can be found here.

  11. New Stats Utility - A new utility called 'nagiostats' is now included in the Nagios distribution. Its a command-line utility that allows you to view current statistics for a running Nagios process. It can also produce data compatible with MRTG, so you can graph statistical information. More information on how to use the utility can be found here.

  12. Adaptive Monitoring - You can now change certain attributes relating to host and service checks (check command, check interval, max check attempts etc.) during runtime by submitting the appropriate external commands. This kind of adaptive monitoring will probably not be of much use to the majority of users out there, but it does provide a way for doing some neat stuff. More information on adaptive monitoring can be found here.

  13. Performance Data Changes - The methods for processing performance data have changed slightly. You can now process performance data by executing external commands and/or writing to files without recompiling Nagios. Read the documentation on performance data for more information.

  14. Native DB Support Dropped - Native support for storing various types of data (status, retention, comment, downtime, etc.) in MySQL and PostgreSQL has been dropped. Stop whining. I expect someone will develop an alternative using the new event broker sometime in the near future. Besides, DB support was not well implemented and dropping native DB support will make things easier for newbies to understand (one less thing to figure out).

  15. Event Broker API - An API has been created to allow individual developers to create addons that integrate with the core Nagios daemon. Documentation on the event broker API will be created as the 2.x code matures and will be available on the Nagios website.

  16. Misc Changes