Systems search start-up Splunk Monday shipped a software add-on to enable Nagios open source monitoring software users to more quickly pinpoint the source of performance problems.

Splunk earlier this year unveiled Splunk Server, software that searches systems management data across an enterprise to more quickly determine the source of a problem. Now the company is working with Nagios, a popular open source systems-monitoring application, to enable Nagios users to diagnose and resolve issues more quickly across their environments.

“The Nagios project is the most successful open source management software out there," said Michael Baum, chief executive spelunker, in a press release. “Users can now navigate directly from a Nagios alert to any IT data from any part of their infrastructure."

The Splunk 2 Nagios module integrates Splunk's troubleshooting capabilities with Nagios network and systems monitoring tools, according to a Splunk press release. Splunk's software runs on Linux, Unix (including Solaris) and Mac OS X - and, with the freeware version, offers users up to 500MB of data indexing per day. The commercial version offers more data indexing features and can be configured to run at scheduled intervals.

The software searches for management data across logs, message queues, configuration files, SNMP traps and database transactions to more quickly correlate events that could be related to a failure - and that network managers would typically have to search manually.

More than 42,000 system administrators, developers and support engineers have downloaded Splunk since its launch late last year, the company says.

Nagios is an open source software package consisting of a monitoring daemon and monitoring plug-ins, which can be used to monitor the health of hosts, such as servers, routers and other network nodes, as well as gauging the availability of general network services such as POP, SMTP and HTTP, among others. The system can also be configured to send notifications via e-mail, pager or cell-phone text messaging during network events, or warning of conditions that could lead to an outage.

According to Splunk, the new software module integrates with Nagios to enable users to index Nagios events in real time, to embed Splunk searches into Nagios alerts and notification and forward Splunk notifications to Nagios for alerting. The module also includes Nagios plug-ins for monitoring Splunk Servers from Nagios.