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

Monitoring individual nodes in a cluster


In this recipe, we'll learn how to monitor a collection of hosts in a cluster, using the check_cluster plugin included in the standard Nagios Plugins. Being able to monitor more than one host collectively is useful in situations with redundancy; one of a set of hosts being DOWN, perhaps for power conservation or maintenance reasons, is not necessarily a cause for notification. However, if a larger number or all of the hosts were down, we would definitely want to be notified. Using check_cluster allows us to arrange this.

Getting ready

You will need a Nagios Core 3.0 or newer server, and have shell access to change its backend configuration. You will also need to have at least two monitored hosts in a redundant setup for some function, such as database replication, DNS servers, or load-balanced web servers.

You should also be familiar with the way hosts and services are defined, and in particular defining commands; these concepts are discussed in Chapter...