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

Introduction


For a dedicated Nagios Core server with access to all the relevant parts of the network, making checks is relatively simple using commands and plugins that make ICMP, TCP, and UDP connections to network hosts and services, in order to determine their operating state. These can be used to check any sort of network service, without requiring anything to be installed on the target machine. As an example, when the check_http plugin is used to check a web server, it works in the same way as if a browser was making the request.

However, monitoring a network thoroughly usually has more to it than simply checking network connectivity and availability. It's also a good idea to check properties of the network that don't directly correspond to a network service, and hence can't be directly checked over a network connection.

These are often properties of hardware or the underlying system, such as disk space or system load average, or processes that are configured only to listen locally, commonly...