Nagios Core Administration Cookbook
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: 1849515565
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The ideal book for System Administrators who want to move their network monitoring to an advanced level. This book covers the powerful features and flexibility of Nagios Core, and its recipes can be applied to virtually any network.
Overview
- Monitor almost anything in a network.
- Control notifications in your network by configuring Nagios Core.
- Get a handle on best practices and time-saving configuration methods for a leaner configuration.
- Use the web interface to control notification behaviour on the fly and for scheduled outages, without restarts
- Pull Nagios Core's data into a database to write clever custom reports of your own devising
In Detail
Network monitoring requires significantly more than just pinging hosts. This cookbook will help you to comprehensively test your networks' major functions on a regular basis.
"Nagios Core Administration Cookbook" will show you how to use Nagios Core as a monitoring framework that understands the layers and subtleties of the network for intelligent monitoring and notification behaviour.
Nagios Core Administration Guide introduces the reader to methods of extending Nagios Core into a network monitoring solution. The book begins by covering the basic structure of hosts, services, and contacts and then goes on to discuss advanced usage of checks and notifications, and configuring intelligent behaviour with network paths and dependencies. The cookbook emphasizes using Nagios Core as an extensible monitoring framework. By the end of the book, you will learn that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to check if websites respond.
What you will learn from this book
- Finding, installing, and writing your own plugins, and learning to reference them as Nagios Core commands for use as host and service checks, including workarounds for making checks through difficult network layouts such as those using Network Address Translation.
- Managing notifications to send the right kind of notifications to the right people at the right time, and defining contact methods besides simple email messages, including an example of automatic contact rotation.
- In-depth examples of using the standard set of Nagios Plugins for common network monitoring needs, with discussion of generic methods for monitoring the results of SNMP queries.
- Remote monitoring methods to handle the situations where Nagios Core cannot directly check a service's status over the network, to check things such as database servers that only listen locally, or hardware devices with no SNMP OIDs exported.
- Defining network structure and dependencies in Nagios Core to enable it to perform its notification behavior more intelligently, and allow you to very quickly find the "root" of particular problems; also how to reflect this structure in the network map once defined, and even decorate it.
- Best practices for managing Nagios Core configuration to make it leaner, more robust, and better suited to programatically generating configuration as specified by other systems.
- Automating other interactions with Nagios Core, including using passive checks to track tasks being performed both locally and in other parts of the network, or running scripts automatically in response to checks; also includes discussion of developing your own reports or vizualisations using automatically exported data from the system.
Approach
This book is written in Cookbook style, beginning with recipes based on basic structure which gradually progresses towards using Nagios Core as a monitoring framework.
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hosts and services configured already, and have a plugin that you would like to remove from the server. In this instance, we'll remove the now unneeded check_rsync plugin from our Nagios Core server. How to do it... We can remove a plugin from our Nagios Core instance as follows: Remove any part of the configuration that uses the plugin, including hosts or services that use it for check_command, and command definitions that refer to the program. As an example, the following definition
network thoroughly usually has more to it than simply checking network connectivity and availability. It's also a good idea to check properties of the network that don't directly correspond to a network service, and hence can't be directly checked over a network connection. These are often properties of hardware or the underlying system, such as disk space or system load average, or processes that are configured only to listen locally, commonly done for database servers. We could install Nagios
the client for your chosen system (git, hg, svn, and so on) installed on your server. This will all work with any version of Nagios Core. It does not involve directly changing any part of the Nagios Core configuration, only keeping track of the files in it. How to do it... We can place our configuration directory under version control as follows: Change to the root of the configuration directory. In the default installation, this is /usr/local/nagios/etc: # cd /usr/local/nagios/etc
can also use it in the host_name definitions for services: define service { use generic-service host_name web-server-.+ service_description HTTP check_command check_http } This is one of a number of very good suggestions for simplifying object definitions suggested in the Nagios Core manual: http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/objecttricks.html. See also The Building groups using regular expressions and Using inheritance to simplify configuration recipes in this chapter The
via Apache HTTPD, it's also often sensible to limit the IP addresses allowed access to the Nagios Core instance, using Order and Allow Apache directives. We could extend the nagios.conf file loaded by Apache as follows:
