Shield Gooses Performance Of Nagios Monitoring Tool, Adds AI Reporting
February 9, 2026 Alex Woodie
Large IBM i installations that experienced performance issues with older versions of Shield Advanced Solutions’ Nagios monitoring tool will be happy to hear that version 3.0 delivers a 2X to 3X performance boost. The new version, which Shield announced last month, also includes an early release of an integration with ChatGPT that automatically generates reports based on the real-time IBM i server metrics gathered by Nagios.
Nagios is a very popular open source IT infrastructure monitoring tool that’s been deployed millions of times around the world. It works by constantly pinging targets, which could be anything from server or storage arrays to PCs and network switches – to determine the current state of the target. Nagios can be configured to conduct a virtually unlimited number of active checks, and can also be collect data passively.
Shield Advanced Solutions developed its own version of Nagios for monitoring IBM i environments. This includes an IBM i-based agent, dubbed NG4i, as well as a plug-in called At-A-Glance (AAG) that works with both the open source (Nagios Core) and paid commercial (Nagios XI) offerings.
The real-time nature of Nagios gives it an advantage compared to other infrastructure monitoring tools that passively collect data. However, that active nature also adds a bit of complexity and overhead. While Shield used high-performance C code to develop the NG4i agent, some users still ran into performance issues, particularly in big deployments on IBM i, said Shield director Chris Hird.
“Performance had become a limiting factor for very large environments,” he told IT Jungle. “In this release, we significantly optimized the processing path.”
That optimization work will speed the reporting of results back to Nagios by up to 5X, and possibly more in some cases, Hird said. Users should see significant improvements in response time when querying a monitored IBM i server from AAG, he said.
“In many cases, we expect these gains to be even greater in production environments although some checks remain constrained by external factors such as the time required to gather system data [and] network latency when retrieving Internet-based information,” Hird said. “Even so, all checks showed measurable improvement, resulting in much faster alerting and notification overall.”
Shield also supports Grafana dashboards in Nagios Core and Nagios XI environments.
Shield includes about 180 checks out of the box with AAG. This includes everything from the amount of DASD available and the percentage of used processor capacity, to the number of active jobs and high availability data replication status. Naturally, Shield supports all of its products in AAG, including HA4i, DR4i, EM4i, and JT4i.
Version 3.0 of AAG adds new audit journal security checks that can indicate to IBM i administrators whether there are active attacks against the system. Shield also added security improvements that have the side benefit of increasing throughput, Hird said.
Meanwhile, Shield also introduced a new ChatGPT integration that allow users to receive AI-generated analysis of the metrics gathered by Nagios.
“With a single click inside your existing Nagios monitoring, you can now ask ChatGPT to analyze recent monitoring data, identify anomalies, and surface potential problems without exporting data, switching tools, or manually interpreting raw metrics,” Shield Software developer Charlie Hird wrote in a January blog post.
Nagios already tells you what is happening, he said. That could be that a service is flapping, latency just passed a certain threshold, error rates have spiked, or a check is behaving differently than usual. “What it doesn’t tell you is why this might be happening, whether the behavior is abnormal, or what patterns stand out across recent data,” the younger Hird continued. “That interpretation usually lives in a system admin’s head.”
This new AI analysis feature aims to help answer those questions instantly. It allows a user to request an AI-driven review of monitoring data collected over the last N seconds directly from the Nagios interface. This can result in faster incident triage, reduced alert fatigue, post-incident review, and helping younger admins or engineers come up to speed, he said.
The ChatGPT integration is optional and is a work in progress, the elder Hird said. “We are actively refining prompt structures to deliver the best possible responses while minimizing hallucinations,” Chris Hird told us. “The insights provided by the LLM should be viewed as suggestions rather than definitive answers.”
The ChatGPT integration requires users to opt in, and does involve sending data collected from IBM i to OpenAI servers. However, it does not endanger the security of IBM i data in any way, the elder Hird said. “Only RRD time-series data from Nagios is shared, and this data is not IBM i-specific,” the elder Hird said. “Even if intercepted, the data consists solely of unrelated numeric metrics with no inherent context or identifiable meaning.”
For more information, check out the vendor’s website at www.shieldadvanced.com.
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