Cloud Director For Nagios ( CDFN ) is an essential, missing tool for Nagios, the world's most popular open-source monitoring software.

CDFN was created for operations people that may or may not have deep experience with monitoring, but need to use Nagios, the most popular open source monitoring soluion in the world, and get configurations done quickly. They also need to do things that the typical, conventional setups of Nagios do not offer. Things like fail-over monitoring, diverse graphing to varied graphing servers like Grafana, and ELK.

Nagios was designed to use 3rd-party add-ons, called plugins, but because of few examples, and missing, essenstial documentation, the very features you need to use were never really brought to light, and the features most people use are actually the worst features you can use. Nagios has actually been well hated because it was never really documented, and it never gets a fair shake because nobody has really shown people how to use it correctly. Until now.

One of the biggest by-products of CDFN is that it actually teaches you the most efficient way to monitor with Nagios so that after you start using CDFN, you are getting hands-on training just by using it. You could actually go further without CDFN after you get the hang of using CDFN, because it teaches you "the hook" to using Nagios. Believe it or not, CDFN turns Nagios into one of the most useful monitoring tools the way it was meant to be. Instead of being just a "program runner", CDFN shows you how to make Nagios one of the most efficient monitoring tools you can use. Nagios becomes something that not only monitors servers, it can be used for business process monitoring.

CDFN was designed by a Nagios expert, based on years of experience using Nagios. There was and is no other tool like it on the market.

Most consumers of Nagios have not even been aware of many of the features of Nagios that really matter. In fact most of the open source community support only the centralized server features of Nagios, and they don't even know about the other decentralized features that really matter. Even the inventor of Nagios has since produced products that are often more difficult and cumbersome than they should be, often making monitoring even more difficult than it should be. Other 3rd-party Nagios add-ons have come along that improve the monitoring landscape using Nagios, but they too have many features and are much less able to exploit the features they really need.

CDFN was designed from scratch to maximize configuration designs. Most of the user interfaces available for Nagios users focus on a centralized monitoring paradigm that actually makes Nagios less capable of delivering advanced features found in newer monitoring software.

CDFN was created to focus on features that matter most, such as prototyping complete monitoring scenarios without ever touching a live server, the ability to generate configuration management code for Puppet, and Terraform, process discovery, and other features that more expensive products offer.

CDFN is currently a Minimum Viable Prototype. This means it works really well if you understand what it is doing and how it works, but it's probably not a good idea to try to sell it or let somebody else use it.

You could compare it to building your own car in a shed, and then wanting to build the real car with a real product team. While the car in your shed works really well, it's not something you want to hand over to other people and expect it to work for them without a lot of hand holding.

With the right team this product has the potential to produce configurations for as many Nagios servers as you can imagine. A perfect use case would be for a data center or enterprise operations team, allowing them to prototype Nagios configurations before actually putting them into production.