I have installed and configured Nagios on Solaris 5.8. How does Nagios communicate with the remote machines it monitors? The nagios monitor console is green but seems to give me bogus results what am I missing? I have read the documentation but it always refers to plug-in technology. I am a little lost at the moment.
nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/installing.html
I think you missed a part on the above url. You have to install the plugins.
Then, after that, you can start following the rest of the documentation step by step.
But, to answer your question, for the most part, nagios doesn’t really communicate with remote hosts, unless you consider doing ping my.remote.machine communication.
Please don’t just read the docs. Make sure you follow them step by step and perform the actions, i.e. configure your hosts.cfg and the like.
nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/installing.html
I think you missed a part on the above url. You have to install the plugins.
Then, after that, you can start following the rest of the documentation step by step.
But, to answer your question, for the most part, nagios doesn’t really communicate with remote hosts, unless you consider doing ping my.remote.machine communication.
Please don’t just read the docs. Make sure you follow them step by step and perform the actions, i.e. configure your hosts.cfg and the like.
nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/installing.html
I think you missed a part on the above url. You have to install the plugins.
Then, after that, you can start following the rest of the documentation step by step.
But, to answer your question, for the most part, nagios doesn’t really communicate with remote hosts, unless you consider doing ping my.remote.machine communication.
Please don’t just read the docs. Make sure you follow them step by step and perform the actions, i.e. configure your hosts.cfg and the like.
Thanks for your response, I was under the impression that nagios could report disk usage on remote machines and run scripts remotely. So if I understand correctly the only thing that nagios can do is ping machines remote machines? I see scripts and binaries to monitor a host of services, how do I get this to work? I have something
Hahahahaha…Nagios can do MUCH more than just ping machines, my friend. Ping is just the default method by which Nagios checks to see that a host is still UP, or reachable. There are plugins located online, and you need to download, unzip and install those on your Nagios server. Nagios can run SNMP checks, SMTP checks…I’ve got mine set to monitor binds to other servers and to monitor POP3 on our mail server.
Now, monitoring local checks (disk space, RAM usage, CPU load, etc) on remote hosts is a bit more involved, because you need to have those checks executed locally on each remote host, and then use a daemon such as NRPE or NSCA to get that information back to Nagios. If you have a large number of checks to make, it would be best to use NSCA, where Nagios accepts passive checks but does not actually issue commands to remotely execute these checks. I’ve only got about 12 or so local checks to execute remotely, so having Nagios instruct NRPE to execute those checks doesn’t produce too much wear on my systems. The other option is to write commands with the check_snmp plugin to monitor these services.
Nagios can do quite a bit. Just download what you need and follow the instructions in the documentation provided and you should be mostly set. Of course, we’re always here to help…
Edited Tue Jan 10 2006, 04:10AM ]
Thanks for your help, I will look into NSCA. I also found some thing else interesting “nagios probe”. I will investigate both options. I am new to the nagios world.
have fun discovering 
Luca