Overview
i started using nagios as a complete noob. the following is a overview of what i have learned.
Nagios is a monitoring tool that identifies problems on your network before end users do. it was desighned to run under linux but can run under other nix variants as well. this includes windows. Plugins can be used to specify what the nagios server is to monitor. these plugins can be downloaded from various site like: sourceforge.net, nagios.org, nagiosexchange.org. Also it is possible to write your own nagios plugins.
more detailed informations is available at www.nagios.org
to monitor another computer in a network you need to have installed a agent on to the computer. the agent will send the information it has collected back to the nagios server to determine its status. Agents can also be written with scripts if a agent cannot be found to suit your purposes. many agents can be found at deadcat.net.au. these agents are made to be used on big brother and not nagios but most of the big brother agents are compatible with nagios.
the most common agents used for nagios is nsclient and nrpe agent. Nsclient can be used to check:
CPU load (single or multi-processors machines)
Memory load
Disk space
Service state
Process state
System uptime
File date & time
you can dowload ns client from:
javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-1 … pm-p2.html
or
nsclient.ready2run.nl/download.htm
some other agents can be found at
nagiosexchange.org/Windows.49.0.html
with nagios when information is collected one would most likely want the information to be readable. to do this you may want to graph the information you come across. some graphing tools that work with nagios are:
Munin graphing tools, found at
www.linpro.no/projects/munin
nagios grapher, found at
nagiosexchange.org/Charts.42 … iew%5D=195
cacti. cacti is one of the better graphing tools. though ive heard of many people claiming that they were able to put it togheter with nagios i havent actually seen evidence of this nor have the explained how they did it. if nagios and cacti can work togheter it would be great.
perfdata graphs are also especially nice. it is the one we use.
these are basics on what i have learnt in my time using nagios. i also added some websites to direct people to information instead of retyping it all since that would be a waste of time when you could just go there… but pls add any corrections, comments, suggestions as by my standards im still a noob 