Setting up Multisite

If you just have one single Nagios installation, then setting up Multisite is easy. Simply install Check_MK. You do not need to do anything in main.mk or install any agent. Just don't forget to install mod_python for Apache from your distribution.

Afterwards restart Apache and point your browser to http://yournagioshost/check_mk.

Doing a distruibuted multi site setup with Multisite begins with doing the single site setup on each of your Nagios servers, whose web users should be able to see data of other sites. On all other servers you do not strictly have to install Check_MK (even if its author will be honored if you do so). A standalone installation of MK Livestatus will do. In addition all remote servers need to give access to Livestatus via TCP.

All configuration is done in the file multisite.mk which is found in the same directory as main.mk (the default is /etc/check_mk) and uses Python syntax. An example file is being installed during setup of Check_MK.

If you have just one site, no further configuration is neccessary and you can directly start using Multisite. The default configuration allows access to the local site for all users logged in via HTTP and gives the user nagiosadmin administrative permissions.

If you want to use Multisite for distributed monitoring, then you need to configure a list of local and remote sites in multisite.mk in the variable sites. Here is an example configuration for two sites - one being local on the same host and one being remote:

sites = {
  "munich" : {
      "alias" : "Munich"
  },
  "paris": {
     "alias":          "Paris",
     "socket":         "tcp:10.0.0.2:6557",
     "url_prefix":     "http://10.0.0.2/",
   },
}

The variable sites is a Python dictionary with one entry for each site. The keys (here munich and paris) are internal identifiers for your sites. Site identifiers must consist out of characters, digits and underscores only. Do not use spaces in site IDs. Use the alias key for providing a site name that displays nicely.

Each entry is itself a Python dictionary with the following possible entries (all entries except alias are optional and have default values):

Please note, that Livestatus currently has no builtin security layer. If you provide remote access via xinetd, please at least restrict the access to the IP addresses of your remote Nagios servers running the Multisite GUI.

If you believe that this is not sufficient (and from the point of view of a network security expert it surely isn't), then please secure your connection with a VPN, an SSH- or SSL-tunnel or some similar method. Livestatus does a simple TCP-connect each time a web page is loaded and thus can be easily secured by deploying standard methods.

Multisites provides a role based authorization mechanism which is configured in multisite.mk and described in another article.