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 checks in Nagios


Nagios is a monitoring tool. It performs checks by running an external command and uses the return code along with output from the command as information on whether the check worked or not. It is the command's responsibility to verify if a host or service is working at the time the command is invoked.

Nagios itself handles all of the internals such as scheduling the commands to be run, storing their results, and determining what the status is for each host and service.

It is required that all plugins follow a specific behavior in order for them to work smoothly. These rules are common for both host and service checks. It requires that each command returns specific result codes, which are outlined in the following table:

Exit code

Status

Description

0

OK

Working correctly

1

WARNING

Working, but needs attention (for example, low resources)

2

CRITICAL

Not working correctly or requires attention

3

UNKNOWN

Plugin was unable to determine the status...