Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

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.

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

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

Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts
Working with Commands and Plugins
Working with Checks and States
Configuring Notifications
Monitoring Methods
Enabling Remote Execution
Using the Web Interface
Managing Network Layout
Managing Configuration
Security and Performance
Automating and Extending Nagios Core