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

Using the web interface


The Nagios web interface always offers a menu on the left frame and the current information is shown in the remaining area. You can easily access all views from the menu on the left.

In case you want to replace the standard Nagios welcome screen with your own screen, all that is needed to be done is to change the /opt/nagios/share/main.php file. As this page is shown to everyone after they log in correctly, it can be used to provide the administrators with some guidelines on how Nagios monitoring is used within your company and what should be done in certain circumstances. It can also be used to define links to commonly checked hosts or commonly accessed services.

It is also possible to extend the menu on the left, which is defined in the /opt/nagios/share/side.php file. This way, quick links can be added to the menu and/or unused functionality can be removed from it.

Throughout the rest of this chapter, we will use the configuration that is different from the one we...