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 6.  Using the Nagios Plugins

The previous chapters discussed the basic configuration of host and service checking along with the description of the web interface. Nagios can be set up to check if your services are up and running. This chapter describes how these checks work in more detail. It also introduces some of the Nagios plugins that are developed as a part of Nagios and as a part of the Nagios Plugins project.

The strength of Nagios comes from its ability to monitor servers and services they offer in a large number of ways. What's more interesting is that all of these ways make sure that your services are provided as functional, are external plugins, and work in quite an easy way. Many of these are even shipped with Nagios, as we mentioned in Chapter 2, Installing Nagios 4, and Chapter 3, Configuring Nagios. Therefore, it is possible to either use the existing plugins or write your own.

In this chapter, you will learn the checks that can be made using the Nagios Plugins project...