Nagios Core Administration Cookbook

Book excerpt: Over 90 hands-on recipes that will employ Nagios Core as the anchor of monitoring on your network About This Book Master the advanced configuration techniques of Nagios Core to model your network better by improving hosts, services, and contacts Filter and improve the notifications that Nagios Core sends in response to failed checks, which can greatly assist you when diagnosing problems Pull Nagios Core's data into a database to write clever custom reports of your own devise Who This Book Is For If you are a network or system administrator and are looking for instructions and examples on working with Nagios Core, then this book is for you. Some basic shell command-line experience is required, and some knowledge of scripting would be helpful when we discuss how plugins work. What You Will Learn Manage the configuration of Nagios Core with advanced techniques to achieve fine detail in your checks Find, install, and even write your own check plugins Filter notifications to send them to the right people or programs at the right time Work around difficult network accessibility issues and delegate checks to other machines Tweak a Nagios Core server to achieve both high performance and redundancy in case of disaster Process the results of checks performed by other machines to monitor backups and similar processes Extend Nagios Core to allow advanced scripting, reporting, and network visualization behavior In Detail Nagios Core is an open source monitoring framework suitable for any network that ensures both internal and customer-facing services are running correctly and manages notification and reporting behavior to diagnose and fix outages promptly. It allows very fine configuration of exactly when, where, what, and how to check network services to meet both the uptime goals of your network and systems team and the needs of your users. This book shows system and network administrators how to use Nagios Core to its fullest as a monitoring framework for checks on any kind of network services, from the smallest home network to much larger production multi-site services. You will discover that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to see whether websites respond. The recipes in this book will demonstrate how to leverage Nagios Core's advanced configuration, scripting hooks, reports, data retrieval, and extensibility to integrate it with your existing systems, and to make it the rock-solid center of your network monitoring world. Style and approach Each chapter contains a set of step-by-step recipes to perform an example of a commonly performed task related to network administration. The book begins by focusing closely on the properties and configuration of Nagios Core itself, and gradually moves on to other pieces of software that can support, manage, and extend the system.