The previous chapter has described how to set up and configure Nagios. Now that our Nagios system is up and running, it will also send out notifications to people if something goes wrong. What we need now is a way to view current and historical information on which hosts and services are failing. Nagios offers just that! It comes with a web interface that can be used to view the status of all hosts and services, read logs, generate reports, and so on. And that's just a small part of its functionality.

Using any browser, you can access almost any information Nagios stores, such as status, performance data, history, and logs. You can check all of your hosts and services to find out whether they are working correctly with just a few clicks. The interface also offers the ability to change parts of configuration on the fly.

The ability to check the status of all the hosts and services is a very valuable functionality. Usually, a notification that shows...