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

Understanding distributed monitoring


There are many situations in which you may want to have more than one Nagios instance monitoring your IT infrastructure. One of them can be because of firewall rules that force checks to be made within local networks. Another reason could be the need to load balance all checks across machines due to latency or the number of checks. Others may need to monitor machines in different physical locations from separate machines to check what is wrong within the local infrastructure, even if the links to the central servers are temporarily down.

Regardless of the reason you may want or need to have the execution of checks split across multiple computers. This type of setup might sound complicated and hard to configure, but it is not as hard as it seems. All that's necessary is to set up multiple Nagios instances along with the NRDP agents or daemons.

There are subtle differences in how various instances need to be configured. Usually, there are one or more Nagios...