iNag for iPhone

, from , is a native iPhone app that can talk to an existing Nagios system without a complicated setup. It does solid job of giving you the information you need in a clear, concise manner. It's not perfect, certainly, but it's not missing much. iNag costs $15 in the App Store, and in my use thus far, I've definitely gotten my money's worth.

Setting up iNag is a two-step process. The first part is buying and downloading the app itself from the iTunes Apple Store. Once that's done, you have to download a separate PHP file that acts as an interface between iNag and your Nagios server. (Just to be clear: You have to have an existing Nagios server to use iNag. iNag is not a network monitoring server by itself, it is a front end to an existing Nagios server. If you're not using Nagios, iNag will be of no use to you at all.)

There's a small amount of customization you have to do to the PHP data feeder file, (inag.php) to set it up for use. First, you have to tell inag.php the paths to your Nagios status file, external command file, and your log file. (If you're somewhat new to Nagios, the paths to these are in the nagios.cfg file in /etc in your nagios base directory.) You should use the full path, not just the relative path, since depending on how you installed it, the base Nagios directory may not be the standard /usr/local/nagios/ tree.

Once that's done, you have to set up read-only and read/write values, for the $ROkey and $RWkey variables. In the current version of iNag, "read/write" only lets you acknowledge problems. You can't actually modify or even restart Nagios from iNag as of yet, so unless you use the problem acknowledgment function, the $ROkey variable is all you'll need. You then copy inag.php into the directory where the HTML files used by Nagios are. I just copied it into the Nagios root web directory, for convenience sake.