Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

By : Tom Ryder

Buy this Book

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

By: Tom Ryder

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Network monitoring requires significantly more than just pinging hosts. This cookbook will help you to comprehensively test your networks' major functions on a regular basis."Nagios Core Administration Cookbook" will show you how to use Nagios Core as a monitoring framework that understands the layers and subtleties of the network for intelligent monitoring and notification behaviour. Nagios Core Administration Guide introduces the reader to methods of extending Nagios Core into a network monitoring solution. The book begins by covering the basic structure of hosts, services, and contacts and then goes on to discuss advanced usage of checks and notifications, and configuring intelligent behaviour with network paths and dependencies. The cookbook emphasizes using Nagios Core as an extensible monitoring framework. By the end of the book, you will learn that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to check if websites respond.

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts

Introduction

Creating a new network host

Creating a new HTTP service

Creating a new e-mail contact

Verifying configuration

Creating a new hostgroup

Creating a new servicegroup

Creating a new contactgroup

Creating a new time period

Running a service on all hosts in a group

Working with Commands and Plugins

Creating a new command

Customizing an existing command

Using an alternative check command for hosts

Writing a new plugin from scratch

Working with Checks and States

Introduction

Specifying how frequently to check a host or service

Changing thresholds for PING RTT and packet loss

Changing thresholds for disk usage

Scheduling downtime for a host or service

Managing brief outages with flapping

Adjusting flapping percentage thresholds for a service

Configuring Notifications

Introduction

Configuring notification periods

Configuring notification for groups

Specifying which states to be notified about

Tolerating a certain number of failed checks

Automating contact rotation

Defining an escalation for repeated notifications

Defining a custom notification method

Monitoring Methods

Introduction

Monitoring PING for any host

Monitoring SSH for any host

Checking an alternative SSH port

Monitoring mail services

Monitoring web services

Checking that a website returns a given string

Monitoring database services

Monitoring the output of an SNMP query

Monitoring a RAID or other hardware device

Creating an SNMP OID to monitor

Enabling Remote Execution

Introduction

Monitoring local services on a remote machine with NRPE

Setting the listening address for NRPE

Setting allowed client hosts for NRPE

Creating new NRPE command definitions securely

Giving limited sudo privileges to NRPE

Using check_by_ssh with key authentication instead of NRPE

Using the Web Interface

Introduction

Using the Tactical Overview

Viewing and interpreting availability reports

Viewing and interpreting trends

Viewing and interpreting notification history

Adding comments on hosts or services in the web interface

Viewing configuration in the web interface

Scheduling checks from the web interface

Acknowledging a problem via the web interface

Managing Network Layout

Introduction

Creating a network host hierarchy

Using the network map

Choosing icons for hosts

Establishing a host dependency

Establishing a service dependency

Monitoring individual nodes in a cluster

Using the network map as an overlay

Managing Configuration

Introduction

Grouping configuration files in directories

Keeping configuration under version control

Configuring host roles using groups

Building groups using regular expressions

Using inheritance to simplify configuration

Defining macros in a resource file

Dynamically building host definitions

Security and Performance

Introduction

Requiring authentication for the web interface

Using authenticated contacts

Writing debugging information to a Nagios log file

Monitoring Nagios performance with Nagiostats

Improving startup times with pre-cached object files

Setting up a redundant monitoring host

Automating and Extending Nagios Core

Introduction

Allowing and submitting passive checks

Submitting passive checks from a remote host with NSCA

Submitting passive checks in response to SNMP traps

Setting up an event handler script

Tracking host and service states with Nagiosgraph

Reading status into a MySQL database with NDOUtils

Writing customized Nagios Core reports

Getting extra visualizations with NagVis

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Introduction

Most administrators of even mid-size networks will choose to dedicate an entire server to monitoring software, and sometimes a whole server just for Nagios Core. This is because of two main factors common to most comprehensive Nagios Core setups:

They have a lot of privileges, because in order to inspect the running state of so many different hosts and services, they need to be conferred appropriate network access. This often means that their IP addresses are whitelisted all over the network. A user who is able to assume that privilege could potentially do a lot of damage.
They have a lot of work to do, and hence ideally have dedicated software and hardware resources to run what can be thousands of host and service checks smoothly and to promptly notice problems and recoveries. If a Nagios Core server is not able to keep up with its check schedule, it could cause delays in notifications about very important services.

It's therefore very important to take into account the security...

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

By : Tom Ryder

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

By: Tom Ryder

Overview of this book

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Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

Introduction