How To Monitor Linux and Windows Server And Network Using Nagios

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: July 11, 2008]

This is a user contributed tutorial.

Nagios is free, open source host, service and network monitoring services. Nagios provides an extensible framework, that can monitor pretty much anything using plugins. Some of the items that can be monitored using Nagios plugins are listed below.

=> Disk space usage of remote Linux and Windows server
=> CPU Usage
=> Memory usage
=> Hardware Temperature
=> VPN tunnels
=> Router and Switches
=> Databases
=> Network services (DHCP, DNS, LDAP, SMTP etc.)

Nagios Configurations are very granular and managed using following three different category of configuration files:

Nagios server and web console configuration files can be used to configure the Nagios server itself. For e.g. Use the nagios.cfg and cgi.cfg
Resource files can be used to store user defined macros and sensitive configuration informations such as passwords.
Object definition configuration files are used to store information about the hosts, services, commands, contacts, notification period etc.

Nagios has a web front end to display the status. Apart from getting the notification about the hosts and service status through email, SMS etc., you can also see the hosts, services, status through nagios web front end. You can project is on the NOC (Network Operation Center) to view the current status of your whole data center. You can also perform few actions on the web console such as disable and enable notification for a specific service. If you have defined the relationship between your hosts properly in the nagios configuration files, you can use the 3D display view to see a graphical representation of the whole data center visually. This also provides reporting feature where you can view the historic data such as availability of a particular service on a specific host over a period of time.

(Fig. 01 – Nagios web UI displaying status of various services on a Linux host)

Notification process on the Nagios is defined at a very granular level that it covers a wide range of possible scenarios on the notification including escalation process where a specific contact group can be notified if an issues has not been fixed after certain number of initial notifications. This is very helpful to automatically notify the management team about a critical service that was not fixed immediately.

Nagios can also be configured in a distributed setup, where datacenters from different parts of the world can be monitored using local nagios server that can report the status back to a central nagios server. This is achieved by NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor) sending monitoring results from the local nagios server to the central server.

Following articles from The Geek Stuff blog, explains about everything that is required to get a jumpstart on the Nagios installation, configuration on Linux. This also explains about how to monitor Linux and Windows host.

This article was written by Ramesh Natarajan. At the The Geek Stuff blog he shares his knowledge and experience on Linux and other Geeky stuff. He has more than 15 years of experience in IT industry and has performed very intensive work on Linux system administration, DBA, Hardware and Storage. nixCraft welcomes readers' tips / howtos.

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