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

Monitoring using NRPE


NRPE is a client-server solution for running check commands on remote computers. It is designed explicitly to allow the central Nagios server to trigger checks on other machines in a secure manner.

NRPE offers a very good security mechanism along with encryption mechanisms. It is possible to specify a list of machines that can run checks via NRPE and which plugins can be run along with aliases that should be used by the central Nagios server.

The main difference is that the communication overhead is much smaller than for running checks over the SSH protocol. This means that both the central Nagios server and the remote machine need less CPU time to perform a check. This is mainly important for Nagios servers that deal with a lot of checks that are performed remotely on machines. If the SSH overhead compared to NRPE is 1 second per each test that has to be run, then when performing 20,000 checks it maps to 5.5 hours that would be spent on SSH overhead.

NRPE also allows...