Book Image

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

By : Tom Ryder
Book Image

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

By: Tom Ryder

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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Nagios Core Administration Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Writing a new plugin from scratch


Even given the very useful standard plugins in the Nagios Plugins set, and the large number of custom plugins available on Nagios Exchange, occasionally as our monitoring setup grows more refined, we may find that there is some service or property of a host that we would like to check, but for which there doesn't seem to be any suitable plugin available. Every network is different, and sometimes the plugins that others have generously donated their time to make for the community don't quite cover all your bases. Generally, the more specific your monitoring requirements get, the less likely it is that there's a plugin available that does exactly what you need.

In this example, we'll deal with a very particular problem that we'll assume can't be dealt with effectively by any known Nagios Core plugins, and we'll write one ourselves using Perl. Here's the example problem:

Our Linux security team wants to be able to automatically check whether any of our servers...