Learning Nagios 3.0

Learning Nagios 3.0 is a must for everyone to own!

Nagios® is open source software primarily used for monitoring hosts and services. Nagios® can monitor services either actively or passively depending upon the type of service and resources available. Nagios® can monitor services actively from either the Nagios® server or from the client using daemons. Nagios® is scalable to the organization’s monitoring requirements.

Nagios is scalable enough to be configured to monitor a home network's hosts and services to monitoring large enterprise systems. Currently, I am working on configuring Nagios® for a large retail environment consisting of thousands of host and services. Learning Nagios 3.0, (2009) by Wojciech Kocjan has proven to be an excellent resource for this project, because of the books organization of how to configure Nagios® from planning to maintenance.

Learning Nagios 3.0 provides a broad enough overview of the Nagios® software that I would recommend it for Chief Information Offices (CIO), Chief Technology Offices (CTO) and System Analysis. Learning Nagios 3.0 provides enough of an overview to provide ample decision-making capabilities as to whether the software is suitable for the organization's environment and how best to monitor your environment. The software is open source and in regard to hardware, well you are free to use your current vendor.

Nagios® is deployed on a Unix or Linux operating system. Deploying Nagios® on a Unix or Linux based server makes sense, because you do not want the overhead incurred with other operating systems. Compiling Nagios® to a specific operating system optimizes resource allocation. “This book covers installing and configuring Nagios 3 on various operating systems, but focuses primarily on the Ubuntu Linux operating system.” (Kocjan, W., 2009, Preface) I have compiled Nagios® on both Ubuntu and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10.

Linux also extends the organizations scalability without extending the organization’s systems administration cost center. Linux operating systems supply the binaries for Apache and MySQL. “Configuring the Web Server,” (Kocjan, W., 2009, pg. 60) provides step-by-step instructions for configuring Apache, so you do not have to be an Apache expert to get Nagios'® web interface up and running. Remember, management wants to be able to see systems at a moments notice and from any location and the web-based interface accomplishes that mission.

Learning Nagios 3.0 examines every aspect of the system's build. URL's are provided for obtaining the Nagios® binaries and flags are explained for compilation of the binaries. Directory structures are provided and explained to the reader, because you want the initial setup to be highly scalable. Extensibility is obtained through plugins and defining objects.

The real power of Nagios comes from its event handlers. Event handlers take the status of a service and perform an action. Take for instance you have Apache running on a server. Setting up an event handler will insure Apache continues to run by restarting the service when the service is down. Honestly, your organization would need an asset allocation of around $1,000,000 for a similar product to restart services when they are down. Learning Nagios 3.0 will save your organization the asset allocation so the assets can be used for building your organization.

Nagios® is a powerful, open source system monitoring tool. The expandability and asset savings alone warrant investigation of Nagios®. Learning Nagios 3.0 will enhance your organization's use of Nagios® and is well worth the expenditure. I have read other books dealing with Nagios®; however, those books do not include the code examples and reference links you will find in Learning Nagios 3.0. Here is a sample chapter so you can evaluate the text for yourself: http://www.packtpub.com/files/learning-nagios-3-sample-chapter-7-passive-checks-and-nsca.pdf

References:

Kocjan, W., (2009). Learning Nagios 3.0. Packt Publishing: Birmingham, Mumbai

For additional helpful hits on configuring Nagios please visit: Tech @ E-Business Juncture Nagios is excellent software for system monitoring and Learning Nagios 3.0 will ensure you have the background to be able to configure Nagios for clients.