Overview
Welcome to our comprehensive Nagios tutorial, where we delve into the world of IT infrastructure monitoring and guide you through the process of effectively implementing and managing Nagios, a powerful open-source monitoring tool.
Nagios is an open-source monitoring system that is mainly used to monitor the performance of servers, network equipment, and other network resources.
What You’ll Learn
In this tutorial, we cover the following key aspects of Nagios:
Introduction to Nagios: Gain a solid understanding of Nagios and its role in monitoring and alerting. Explore the core concepts, such as host and service monitoring, checks, notifications, and the Nagios plugin ecosystem.
Installing and Configuring Nagios: Learn how to install and set up Nagios on your Linux system. Follow step-by-step instructions to configure hosts, services, and notifications in Nagios, and understand the structure of the configuration files. Explore different configuration options and customize Nagios to suit your specific monitoring needs.
Monitoring Hosts and Services: Discover how to define host and service checks in Nagios. Learn how to configure active and passive checks, set thresholds for alerts, and monitor various aspects of your IT infrastructure, such as server availability, CPU usage, disk space, and network services.
Notifications and Alerting: Dive into Nagios’ powerful notification and alerting capabilities. Learn how to configure email, SMS, and other types of notifications to receive alerts when issues are detected. Explore advanced features, such as escalations, downtime scheduling, and event handlers, to optimize your alerting workflow.
Visualizing and Reporting: Explore ways to visualize monitoring data and generate reports in Nagios. Learn how to use Nagios’ built-in web interface to view status information, performance graphs, and historical data. Discover techniques to create customized reports and leverage third-party visualization tools to gain deeper insights into your IT infrastructure.
Extending Nagios with Plugins: Discover the vast plugin ecosystem that extends Nagios’ functionality. Learn how to install and configure Nagios plugins to monitor specific technologies, applications, and devices. Explore popular plugins, such as check_ldap, check_mysql, and check_http, to expand your monitoring capabilities.
Scaling and High Availability: Understand strategies for scaling Nagios and achieving high availability. Explore options for distributed monitoring and load balancing, as well as techniques for setting up redundant Nagios instances to ensure continuous monitoring of your infrastructure.
Throughout this tutorial, we provide practical examples, configuration snippets, and command-line instructions to help you become proficient in Nagios administration. We aim to make the complexities of Nagios accessible to both beginners and experienced system administrators, empowering you to effectively monitor and manage your IT infrastructure.
By the end of this tutorial, you will have a comprehensive understanding of Nagios and be equipped with the skills to set up, configure, and maintain a robust monitoring environment. Whether you are monitoring a small network or a large-scale enterprise infrastructure, our Nagios tutorial will guide you every step of the way.
Chapters
Chapter 1 : Getting started with Nagios
Nagios has been a stalwart of the open source, and monitoring industry for almost 20 years. It is designed to notify the system administrator about any network problem that arises, and can be configured to e-mail or page an administrator at any time of day.
Chapter 2 : Configuring Nagios
Nagios provides a web-based UI with detailed graphs and statistics to show if a system or service is in a healthy or unhealthy state. It is a very useful tool that can help you keep your system in good health and prevent outages.
Chapter 3 : Using the Built-in Web and Additional Interfaces
The interface offers different ways to see things such as graphs, list of hosts, list of services, list of notifications and event logs.
Nagios offers an additional interface that can be used to monitor the status of different processes or applications.
Chapter 4 : Using the Nagios Plugins
The Nagios Plugins are open-source plugins that can monitor services and servers for availability.
Chapter 5 : Notifications and Events
Nagios notifications are typically the first type of notification that users see when they log into their Nagios server. If a user has notifications turned off, these notifications will not appear on the console.
Chapter 6 : Passive Checks and NRDP
The NRDP is a monitoring tool that uses passive checks to monitor the health of your infrastructure. It works by continuously checking the status of your servers and other devices through passive checks.
Chapter 7 : Monitoring Remote Hosts
Nagios checks if the remote host is up and running, if it goes down, Nagios takes appropriate actions. With Nagios Monitoring Remote Hosts, you can monitor all kinds of services remotely without needing to install extra software on your remote network.
Chapter 8 : Monitoring Using SNMP
Nagios monitoring using SNMP allows for users to receive alerts when something goes wrong with their servers in real-time. It can also be done by other means such as BGP or ARP.
Chapter 9 : Advanced Monitoring
Nagios Advanced Monitoring (NAM) is a new feature that was recently introduced by Nagios Enterprises. NAM provides enterprise-level monitoring features without sacrificing common features like Nagios Core and Nagios XI.
Chapter 10 : Programming Nagios
Nagios is a command-line program that operates on UNIX and Linux operating systems. It receives instructions from monitoring plugins, which monitor the availability and performance of computer systems by sending notifications to Nagios when changes occur.
