Book Image

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Tom Ryder
Book Image

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Tom Ryder

Overview of this book

Nagios Core is an open source monitoring framework suitable for any network that ensures both internal and customer-facing services are running correctly and manages notification and reporting behavior to diagnose and fix outages promptly. It allows very fine configuration of exactly when, where, what, and how to check network services to meet both the uptime goals of your network and systems team and the needs of your users. This book shows system and network administrators how to use Nagios Core to its fullest as a monitoring framework for checks on any kind of network services, from the smallest home network to much larger production multi-site services. You will discover that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to see whether websites respond. The recipes in this book will demonstrate how to leverage Nagios Core's advanced configuration, scripting hooks, reports, data retrieval, and extensibility to integrate it with your existing systems, and to make it the rock-solid center of your network monitoring world.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


For a dedicated Nagios Core server with access to all the relevant parts of the network, making checks is relatively simple using commands and plugins that make ICMP, TCP, and UDP connections to network hosts and services for determining their operating state. These can be used to check any sort of network service, without requiring anything to be installed on the target machine. As an example, when the check_http plugin is used to check a web server, it works the same way as a browser making the request.

However, monitoring a network thoroughly usually has more to it than simply checking network connectivity and availability. It's also a good idea to check properties of the network that don't directly correspond to a network service and hence can't be directly checked over a network connection.

These are often properties of hardware or the underlying system, such as disk space or system load average, or processes that are configured only to listen locally, commonly done for database...