In the previous chapter, we walked through the standard Nagios plugins, which can be used to monitor a large variety of hosts and services. We learned how the plugins can be used to perform specific and generic checking of the IT resources. This chapter describes some guidelines that will help you migrate from small (and increasing) Nagios setups to a flexible model by using templates and grouping effectively. Any experienced administrator knows that there is a huge difference between a working system and a properly configured system. Using this advice will help you and your team survive the switch from monitoring only critical services to checking the health of the majority of your IT infrastructure.

This chapter focuses on how to set up templates, groupings, and the naming structure. However, creating a robust monitoring system involves much more—be sure to read the following chapters that talk about monitoring other servers, setting up multiple hosts that...