Our Nagios setup is now complete and ready to be started! We took the road from source code into a working application. We have also configured it so that it monitors the machine it is running on from scratch, and it took very little time and effort to do this.

Our Nagios installation now uses three directories:/opt/nagios for binaries, /etc/nagios for the configuration, and /var/nagios for storing the data. All object definitions are stored in a categorized way as subdirectories /etc/nagios. This allows a much easier management of Nagios objects.

We have configured the server on which Nagios is running to be monitored. You might want to add more servers just to see how it all works. We told Nagios to monitor the SSH server, but most probably you'll also want to monitor other things such as a web server or an e-mail.

Chapter 4, Using the Nagios Plugins will help when it comes to setting up various types of checks. Make sure to also read the /etc/nagios/commands/default.cfg file to...