A vanilla out of the box example of the Nagios/NagVis/PNP4Nagios integration. The usual installation pains of all the dependencies required for the packages. Setup was not too difficult following the documentation. I created a simple hardware diagram in Visio in this example. I added icons for HOST status and the CPU Load and Root Partition service checks. I updated the "hover" template for NagVis to show the PNP4Nagios graphs for the services.

As you can see, you have the ability to create some slick visuals. You can create a high level dashboard and drill down to more detailed maps. Of course this all works much better when your hardware and logical layouts are relatively static. In a very dynamic environment Nagios can be an administrative pain and this only increases the complexity.