Infrastructure Monitoring with Nagios
Tags: Nagios, Network Monitoring, Server Monitoring
Nagios is an open source program that monitors your hosts, services and network devices. A monitoring program such as Nagios can proactively inform you about potential problems before they really start impacting your business. It’s designed to run under Linux but is known to work on other popular flavors of Unix as well. Installation and initial configuration of Nagios can be quite tricky but once you get it up and running, monitoring and reporting is a pretty easy job. It can proactively alert you about problems via emails, instant messages and SMS etc. There is also a browser interface to help you see the historical logs, current status of monitored devices and reports.
Important features of Nagios
Nagios has many powerful and useful features, some of the important ones are listed below.
- It can monitor services such as SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.
- Monitoring of host resources such as processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.
- Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers.
- Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during planned maintenance.
- Ability to acknowledge problems via the web interface.
- Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
Other than the features listed above, Nagios comes with an easy to understand plugin design that you can use and develop your own monitoring plugins. Another great feature that many other monitoring programs do not offer is the ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable. What this means is that if a router that has several servers behind it goes offline, Nagios will be able to tell you that the router is down and the servers are not reachable. Other monitoring systems may show all the devices to be down.
Nagios being an open source program can not only save you thousands of dollars that you could have otherwise invested in commercial monitoring softwares but also offer you with enterprise grade monitoring that is reliable and robust in it’s performance. You should give it a try and check it out before you invest in commercial softwares.
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