Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

by David Josephsen

Build real-world, end-to-end network monitoring solutions with Nagios This is the definitive guide to building low-cost, enterprise-strength monitoring infrastructures with Nagios, the world’s leading open source monitoring tool. Network monitoring specialist David Josephsen goes far beyond the basics, demonstrating how to use third-party tools and plug-ins to solve the specific problems in your unique environment. Josephsen introduces Nagios “from the ground up,” showing how to plan for success and leverage today’s most valuable monitoring best practices. Then, using practical examples, real directives, and working code, Josephsen presents detailed monitoring solutions for Windows, Unix, Linux, network equipment, and other platforms and devices. You’ll find thorough discussions of advanced topics, including the use of data visualization to solve complex monitoring problems. This is also the first Nagios book with comprehensive coverage of using Nagios Event Broker to transform and extend Nagios. If you’re responsible for systems monitoring infrastructure in any organization, large or small, this book will help you achieve the results you want–right from the start. David Josephsen is Senior Systems Engineer at DBG, Inc., where he maintains a collection of geographically dispersed server farms. He has more than a decade of hands-on experience with Unix systems, routers, firewalls, and load balancers in support of complex, high-volume networks. Josephsen’s certifications include CISSP, CCNA, CCDA, and MCSE. His co-authored work on Bayesian spam filtering earned a Best Paper award at USENIX LISA 2004. He has been published in both ;login and Sysadmin magazines on topics relating to security, systems monitoring, and spam mitigation. Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Best Practices
CHAPTER 2 Theory of Operations
CHAPTER 3 Installing Nagios
CHAPTER 4 Configuring Nagios
CHAPTER 5 Bootstrapping the Configs
CHAPTER 6 Watching
CHAPTER 7 Visualization
CHAPTER 8 Nagios Event Broker Interface
APPENDIX A Configure Options
APPENDIX B nagios.cfg and cgi.cfg
APPENDIX C Command-Line Options
Index

262 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2007

Reviews

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite quick overview for nagios. It also has a good section on rrdtool and good advice about not falling for all those pretty ui tools that claim Solution. Delivered. -- whatever.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nagios already has extensive online documentation and one of the best and most active communities, so why do you need this book? You need it because it is most assuredly not an attempt to simply rehash existing documentation.

This book does a great job of addressing the challenges involved in deploying Network Monitoring generally, and then providing the reasons why Nagios is the best choice for providing the needed functionality, and how to go about making sure your implementation is a success.

Best of all it is not a dry technical reference tome. Such things have their place, but what seems to be more lacking in a lot of systems administrators is a deeper more cohesive understanding of how it all works together, and why it works that way. This book presents that information in a way that is easy to read. The author's personality quite clearly shines through in most of the book, making it rather easy and even enjoyable reading. Something that sadly is often lacking in many of todays over-edited technical works.

The author punctuates his points where necessary with easily understood examples that drive the point home, and help to communicate the scope of the issue with potential impacts. Most any seasoned Nagios administrator will recognize at least variants on many of the examples he uses as incidents from their own history.

One other point worthy of mentioning is that he is quite clearly not afraid of the manual administration of Nagios. There is a weird trend among some *nix administrators these days that says if you can't click through a few forms and be done then it's too hard. This book not only doesn't shy away from this, it takes the time to explain why this is exactly what we don't want.

If I could recommend improvements for this book, it would be to include a full case study on deploying Nagios in an environment. Mapping the network, examples of the management involvement he describes, the structure and content of the resulting config files and notification schemes, and so on. Perhaps then with a series of changes describing the way Monitoring systems tend to change over time. Responding to needs for an on-call rotation, people whining about the number and types of pages they receive, etc. Perhaps the addition of another network segment or location, or a recurring situation that requires the creation of an event handler to manage. This would round out the end of the book well and help to draw all the presented concepts together for the reader.

Regardless, if you're thinking, are in the middle of, or have already implemented a monitoring system I highly recommend this work. Even seasoned Nagios administrators may benefit from the reading of alternative approaches and more recent features available through Nagios - such as performance metrics and the event broker.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Left me wanting but only a little.

This is a great book for anyone who wants to implement Nagios for network/host monitoring. It covers nearly all of the important stuff. The best part was how it explained the use of performance data with nagiosgraph and rrdtool.

I have been using Nagios for almost 10 years (since it was netsaint) and still learned quite a bit from this book.

What was missing in my opinion was a clear explanation of how to use event-handlers to remotely restart services (hint: create an account called nagios with a passphrase-less ssh key for authentication and sudo ability). Also the approach taken by the author was not quite what I'd expect from a nagios book. He went on about things that were tangential to Nagios, like doing customized graphing and stuff.

B+