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

Chapter 13. Programming Nagios

The previous chapter provided information about monitoring Microsoft Windows machines and several approaches to more advanced monitoring using Nagios.

One of the key features of Nagios is its extensibility. There are multiple ways in which Nagios can be tailored to suit your needs. This chapter focuses on extending Nagios functionality using code written by yourself. It is possible to integrate Nagios tightly with your applications and benefit from a powerful mechanism for scheduling and performing checks.

You will learn how to perform both active and passive checks, send custom notifications to users on behalf of Nagios, access Nagios status information, and manage it.

Nagios 4 provides an interface called query handler, which is a general purpose mechanism that allows other processes to communicate with Nagios. It allows two-way communication. So, it is possible to both send commands to Nagios, similar to external commands pipe, as well as receive information...