28. 10. 2025 Attilio Broglio ITOA, NetEye, Unified Monitoring

Grafana – Node Graph and Icinga

Among the several plugins that Grafana provides is Node Graph, a useful plugin for visualizing elements and relationships between them. This plugin, as described in the article: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/panels-visualizations/visualizations/node-graph/ , can be used to represent:

Solution topologies
Networks
Infrastructure
Organizational charts
Critical path diagrams
…

To verify its usefulness within NetEye, we adapt it to the data present in Icinga. In this POC, we import our hosts as “Nodes” and their dependencies as “Edges” in order to allow a “dynamic” mapping. Using the schema proposed in this article, we create Nodes and Edges with their mandatory fields (columns with * are mandatory fields).

Example of the structure of the “Nodes”

id*	Title	subtitle	mainstat	secondarystat	color	icon	highlighted
node1	PC	Windows	AMD	16gbRAM	blue		true
node2	PC	Linux	Intel	32gbRAM	green	eye	false
node3	Mac	MacOS	M3	16gbRAM	gray	apps	false

Example of the structure of the “Edges”

id*	source*	target*	mainstat	seconddarystat	thickness	highlighted	Color
edge1	node1	node2	TheMain	TheSub	3	true	cyan
edge2	node3	node2	Main2	Sub2	1	false	orange

So we start by using Icinga as a data source and build a query that extracts the hosts to use as “Nodes”. The “Query” relates these 3 tables from the database:

icinga_hosts
icinga_objects
icinga_hoststatus

SELECT
  i_o.object_id AS id 
  , i_o.name1 AS title
  , i_h.address AS subtitle 
  , CASE 
    WHEN i_h_s.current_state = 0 THEN "[UP]"
    WHEN i_h_s.current_state = 1 THEN "[DOWN]" 
    ELSE "[UNKNOWN]" 
    END AS mainstat 
  , i_h_s.output AS secondarystat
  , CASE 
    WHEN i_h_s.current_state = 0 THEN "green"
    WHEN i_h_s.current_state = 1 THEN "red" 
    ELSE "purple"
    END AS color  
  , "cube"  AS icon
  , false AS highlighted 
from icinga_hosts i_h 
 LEFT JOIN icinga_objects i_o ON i_h.host_object_id=i_o.object_id 
 LEFT JOIN icinga_hoststatus i_h_s ON i_h.host_object_id=i_h_s.host_object_id;

The result of running this is the list of the 4 test hosts present in our NetEye Installation.

To test links between objects we simulate parent-child dependencies in Icinga with NEP activated such as:

kubernetes-node01
- switch1
kubernetes-node02
- switch1
- switch2

In this way, the custom_var nx_parent_hosts has been populated with the correct dependencies on the respective hosts: [“switch-1“] and [“switch-1“, “switch-2“].

Then we use a second query that relates the tables thus providing the Edges for the chart

icinga_customvariables
icinga_objects

The result is a dynamic dashboard that, although simple, allows us to get an idea of the potential that this plugin can give us:

These Solutions are Engineered by Humans

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