Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

Over 90 hands-on recipes that will employ Nagios Core as the anchor of monitoring for your networks

About This Book

• Master the advanced configuration techniques of Nagios Core to model your network better by improving hosts, services, and contacts
• Filter and improve the notifications that Nagios Core sends in response to failed checks, which can greatly assist you when diagnosing problems
• Pull Nagios Core's data into a database to write clever custom reports of your own devise

Who This Book Is For

If you are a network or system administrator and are looking for instructions and examples on working with Nagios Core, then this book is for you. Some basic shell command-line experience is required, and some knowledge of scripting would be helpful when we discuss how plugins work.

What You Will Learn

• Manage the configuration of Nagios Core with advanced techniques to achieve fine detail in your checks
• Find, install, and even write your own check plugins
• Filter notifications to send them to the right people or programs at the right time
• Work around difficult network accessibility issues and delegate checks to other machines
• Tweak a Nagios Core server to achieve both high performance and redundancy in case of disaster
• Process the results of checks performed by other machines to monitor backups and similar processes
• Extend Nagios Core to allow advanced scripting, reporting, and network visualization behavior

In Detail

Nagios Core is an open source monitoring framework suitable for any network that ensures both internal and customer-facing services are running correctly and manages notification and reporting behavior to diagnose and fix outages promptly. It allows very fine configuration of exactly when, where, what, and how to check network services to meet both the uptime goals of your network and systems team and the needs of your users.

This book shows system and network administrators how to use Nagios Core to its fullest as a monitoring framework for checks on any kind of network services, from the smallest home network to much larger production multi-site services. You will discover that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to see whether websites respond.

The recipes in this book will demonstrate how to leverage Nagios Core's advanced configuration, scripting hooks, reports, data retrieval, and extensibility to integrate it with your existing systems, and to make it the rock-solid center of your network monitoring world.

Key Features

• Master the advanced configuration techniques of Nagios Core to model your network better by improving hosts, services, and contacts
• Filter and improve the notifications that Nagios Core sends in response to failed checks, which can greatly assist you when diagnosing problems
• Pull Nagios Core's data into a database to write clever custom reports of your own devise

Book Description

Nagios Core is an open source monitoring framework suitable for any network that ensures both internal and customer-facing services are running correctly and manages notification and reporting behavior to diagnose and fix outages promptly. It allows very fine configuration of exactly when, where, what, and how to check network services to meet both the uptime goals of your network and systems team and the needs of your users.

This book shows system and network administrators how to use Nagios Core to its fullest as a monitoring framework for checks on any kind of network services, from the smallest home network to much larger production multi-site services. You will discover that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to see whether websites respond.

The recipes in this book will demonstrate how to leverage Nagios Core's advanced configuration, scripting hooks, reports, data retrieval, and extensibility to integrate it with your existing systems, and to make it the rock-solid center of your network monitoring world.

What you will learn

• Manage the configuration of Nagios Core with advanced techniques to achieve fine detail in your checks
• Find, install, and even write your own check plugins
• Filter notifications to send them to the right people or programs at the right time
• Work around difficult network accessibility issues and delegate checks to other machines
• Tweak a Nagios Core server to achieve both high performance and redundancy in case of disaster
• Process the results of checks performed by other machines to monitor backups and similar processes
• Extend Nagios Core to allow advanced scripting, reporting, and network visualization behavior

About the Author

Tom Ryder is a systems administrator and former web developer from New Zealand. He uses Nagios Core as part of his "day job" as a systems administrator, monitoring the network for a regional Internet service provider. Tom works a great deal with Unix-like systems, being a particular fan of GNU/Linux, and writes about usage of open source, command-line development tools on his blog, Arabesque, at http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts
2. Working with Commands and Plugins
3. Working with Checks and States
4. Configuring Notifications
5. Monitoring Methods
6. Enabling Remote Execution
7. Using the Web Interface
8. Managing Network Layout
9. Managing Configuration
10. Security and Performance
11. Automating and Extending Nagios Core