Book Image

Learning Nagios - Third Edition

By : Wojciech Kocjan, Piotr Beltowski
Book Image

Learning Nagios - Third Edition

By: Wojciech Kocjan, Piotr Beltowski

Overview of this book

Nagios, a powerful and widely used IT monitoring and management software for problem -solving. It detects problems related to your organizations infrastructure and helps in resolving the issue before it impacts the business. Following the success of the previous edition, this book will continue to help you monitor the status of network devices and also notify the system administrators of network problems. Starting with the fundamentals, the book will teach you how to install and configure Nagios for your environment. The book helps you learn how to end downtimes, adding comments and generating reports using the built-in Web interface of Nagios. Moving on, you will be introduced to the third-party web interfaces and applications for checking the status and report specific information. As you progress further in Learning Nagios, you will focus on the standard set of Nagios plugins and also focus on teach you how to efficiently manage large configurations and using templates. Once you are up to speed with this, you will get to know the concept and working of notifications and events in Nagios. The book will then uncover the concept of passive check and shows how to use NRDP (Nagios Remote Data Processor). The focus then shifts to how Nagios checks can be run on remote machines and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) can be used from Nagios. Lastly, the book will demonstrate how to extend Nagios by creating custom check commands, custom ways of notifying users and showing how passive checks and NRDP can be used to integrate your solutions with Nagios. By the end of the book, you will be a competent system administrator who could monitor mid-size businesses or even large scale enterprises.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Nagios - Third Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 10. Monitoring Remote Hosts

Nagios offers various ways of monitoring computers and services. The previous chapter talked about passive checks and how they can be used to submit results to Nagios. It also discussed NRDP, which can be used to send check results from other machines to the Nagios server.

This chapter talks about another approach to check the service status. It uses Nagios active checks that run the actual check commands on different hosts. This approach is most useful in cases where resources local to a particular machine are to be checked, such as monitoring disk and memory usage as well as checking if your operating system is up to date. This type of data cannot be checked without running commands on the target computer.

Remote checks are usually used in combination with the Nagios plugins package that use either SSH or NRPE to run the plugins on the remote machine. This makes monitoring remote systems very similar to monitoring a local computer, with a difference only...