An Introduction to Nagios
Nagios, or more specifically Nagios Core is an Open Source system and network monitoring application. Since it was first launched in 1999, Nagios has grown to include thousands of projects developed by the Nagios community. Nagios is officially sponsored by Nagios Enterprises, which supports the community in a number of different ways through sales of its commercial products and services.
Some of the many features of Nagios Core include:
- Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
- Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks
- Parallelized service checks
- Ability to define network host hierarchy using “parent” hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
- Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or an alternative user-defined method)
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
- Automatic log file rotation
- Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
- Optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log files, etc.
Nagios can monitor an IT infrastructure to ensure systems, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly. In the event of a failure, Nagios can alert technical staff of the problem, allowing them to begin remediation processes before outages affect business processes, end-users, or customers. In short, it watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better.
Nagios is one of, if not the industry leading infrastructure monitoring platforms, the following book provides a useful guide to getting up and started hosting your own version on a Raspberry Pi.
Is this book associated with, supported by or in any way representing the good folks at Nagios? Nope. Don’t get me wrong. Great product, approach and I’m a big fan, but ultimately the book is a reflection of me learning how to do something and writing it down. No part of it is the responsibility of Nagios. Any and all errors will be mine. Feel free to follow my trail, but ultimately I won’t be the one typing the commands on your computer ;-).