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.

• Understand how Nagios works, in depth: the host and service paradigm, plug-ins, scheduling, and notification

• Configure Nagios successfully: config files, templates, timeperiods, contacts, hosts, services, escalations, dependencies, and more

• Streamline deployment with scripting templates, automated discovery, and Nagios GUI tools

• Use plug-ins and tools to systematically monitor the devices and platforms you need to monitor, the way you need to monitor them

• Establish front-ends, visual dashboards, and management interfaces with MRTG and RRDTool

• Build new C-based Nagios Event Broker (NEB) modules, one step at a time

• Contains easy-to-understand code listings in Unix shell, C, and Perl

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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 12 Ratings

Not Much More Thorough Than Existing Documentation - 2007-09-24
Reviewer Rating:
It's well written, but it didn't provide much more insights and coverage than reading the existing documentation you can download for free. There are also some glaring gaps in its coverage. There's nothing about passive checks! And I don't think it was written before v3.0 came out.

If you like written docs for stuff you reference often, it will be worth the money. But don't go to it with any significant troubleshooting problem.

Good for quickstart - 2008-03-01
Reviewer Rating:
Main benefit of this book is that it will teach you many things in a short time. You might want to purchase it if you want a quick start on Nagios, and don't plan to use Nagios on larger systems. Also, although the author's (brief?) style has some benefits, it also has some drawbacks.

Things like distributed monitoring, fail-over, passive checks,... are barely touched. If you are installing Nagios for the first time, you probably won't miss these subjects elaborated, because you will want to have it running soon as possible. However, I think the Apress book covers these advanced topics much better, and gives a more comprehensive overview of Nagios. The decision is up to you. I preferred the lengthier book with more things explained, although it was a bit harder to read.

One more thing that I disliked was that for Passive checks author references Chapter 2. I couldn't find anything about passive checks there, so I checked the Index. No mention of them there either. I gave this book a relatively bad review due to this kind of unclear issues and for the lack of distributed monitoring and failover coverage, which I think is very important for a monitoring system in a serious installation.

As said, some things are better in this book than in Apress one (like ie. Windows check explanation), but in general, Apress book left a better impression on me.

Great book, concise and to the point. - 2009-06-19
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book to learn Nagios from scratch to help me set up a reliable monitoring system for our live network.

Before this book all I knew about Nagios was that it was supposed to be difficult to configure (lots of people told me this). Whilst I was reading this book I thought everything was very easy and straight forward. When I was nearing the end I was thinking "hold on there isn't much left in this book, when does it get hard?" It doesn't! Nagios is easy and this book shows you how to quickly setup a basic monitoring system. No messing about concise and to the point.

I had my base nagios system running within a few hours, checking the load, memory, disk space, ping, on all my servers (Linux and Windows), switches, routers, etc. With SMS alerts going to the on call engineer according to time and date conditions etc.

If you are comfortable with Linux and configs then Nagios is a piece of cake with this book.

An excellent discussion of the challenges in monitoring - 2009-01-22
Reviewer Rating:
David Josephsen's book provides excellent advice on how to bootstrap nagios for
your network. In addition it's also an excellent discussion of the challenges
inherent in using software to monitor software. The first two chapters are all I
needed to get a working set of object templates written and host/service
definitions loaded. The chapter on writing plugins is also excellent. What
makes this book stand out for me is that I have worked with many other nagios
installations where the original designer didn't have a plan before bring the
system online. These installations all failed and were quickly ignored due to
all the false positives. Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios
teaches you how to get started properly so this will not happen to you. It
explains how to build an infrastructure, not just install nagios. Like any
infrastructure, it should change with time. The advice from this books gave me
the confidence that Nagios is not only able, but best suited to serve this
complicated task.

In conculsion, Nagios is now performing many of the more unplesant tasks I was
once responsible for...and I trust it to do so. Each alert is taken seriously,
each event handler performs it's function. I would not have reached this goal
without this book.

Good but not what I had hoped - 2008-09-17
Reviewer Rating:
The only thing that I found helpful not in the Nagios documentation is the scripting piece. It provides good ideas for creating nagios configs for large environment quickly. I was looking for at least a detailed information on integrating it with a third party rrd tool such as cacti for creating trends based on historical data.

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