Verifying configuration

You should have a working Nagios Core 4.0 or better server running.

We can verify the Nagios Core configuration as follows:

The configuration is parsed as though Nagios Core were about to start up, to check that the configuration all makes sense. It will run basic checks, such as looking for syntax errors, and will also check things such as having at least one host and service to monitor. Some of the things it reports are warnings, meaning that they're not necessarily problems, such as hosts not having any services monitored or not reporting to any contacts.

This is the quickest way to get an idea of whether the Nagios Core configuration is sane and will work correctly and whenever, there's trouble restarting the Nagios Core server, it's a good idea to check the output of this command.

The program at /usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios is actually the same program that runs the Nagios Core server, but the -v part of the command is a switch for the program that, instead of starting the server, verifies the configuration and shows any problems with it. The second path is to the configuration file with which Nagios Core starts, which in turn imports configuration files for objects such as the contact, host, and service definitions.