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

Configuring Nagios


In this chapter, you will learn about other ways in which the Nagios status can be checked as well as how Nagios itself can be managed.

Nagios configuration is stored in a separate directory. Usually it's either in /etc/nagios or /usr/local/etc/nagios. If you have followed the steps for manual installation, it will be in the /etc/nagios directory.

The default installation creates a sample host called localhost and a few services. We will now create additional hosts and services, and create a more robust directory structure to manage all of the objects.

The main Nagios configuration file is called nagios.cfg, and it's the main file that is loaded during Nagios startup.

Its syntax is simple, a line beginning with # is a comment, and all lines in the form of <parameter>=<value> set a value. In some cases, a value might be repeated (such as specifying additional files/directories to read).

The following is a sample of the Nagios main configuration file:

# log file to...