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Nagios Advice

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by dumphrey

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Greetings all. I am finishing a Debian install, default, though I will be using XFCE. I am going to install Nagios for testing/learning purposes. What I am after is bandwidth monitoring (at least total bandwidth up/down from a server. Type of traffic a happy plus but not required). I have limited time to learn this atm, which makes it even more difficult. Anyone have some good links to how-to's, or practical experience with nagios?

9 replies

by symon.l

This is pretty handy.

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16723.html

we use nagios @ work its a very simple bit of software. I dont think you find it to difficult to get to know.

by dumphrey

best part was it led me to some others with good info as well. Thanks.

by dawgit

There are tons of books, articles, and information around here. But that won't help you there, and since most are in German it would take me forever to get it (the information anyway) to you in readable English. First get it set-up play with it a bit, than I bet you'll find out any question you think you might have will have been answered automaticly. Then if you have a specific question, fire-away. Don't forget that there are several sites, and a lot of plug-ins available for Nagios. So if you don't see something you'd like to have, chances are some-one else has already built it. (Nagios has been around more than 4 years now.) -d

by dumphrey

in Debian. The only gotcha was it does not run the htpasswd script to create a login for the nagiosadmin user, so had to do that manually. Looking at the web interface atm, trying to get a feel for it. My next task is adding hosts. Then I will see what I need after that..

by dumphrey

Debian puts all the files for Nagios in non-standard places and changes the layout of some files. Needless to say this creates confusion. Today or tomorrow depending on time, I will be installing it from source instead of Apt-get. That will allow me to set the paths to default...

Other then that, it seems a little programming intensive up front, ie adding every machine to a template, but I imagine there is away to automate that through scripting, or create a text file listing hosts and then use that file as the target for the Nagios Host template.

But, once I re-install, it looks like it should do the trick in our environment. We only have 4 servers I need to monitor (#5 is dead, it just hasn't stopped serving files yet :) ) and about 25 workstations. The Macs are all handled by pre-press, so I have minimal responsibility there.

Thanks for the suggestion to look into Nagios.

by dawgit

My experiance with Debian is limited, and it's been awhile as well. I went off on the SuSE / Red Hat route. (My last company was SuSE oriented too.) So you're learning me something here. ;-) I think however, your idea on installing from Source would be the better way. (maybe Jaqui would have more to say about that.)

As for the templates, I think I remember seeing that mentioned before somewhere. It seems a normal idea to me. I believe the jist of it was to build the templates on Vim save to a file, and retrieve as necessary. Then plug them in to the Nagios Host File as you said. By doing that that way, you'll have a standardized method and it will be documented as well.

On the Macs, you probably don't need to worry about them anyway, do you? -d

edited to add: on the #5, that reminds me of a movie with a robot thing named #5, I'd have to ask my kids what the name of it was though.

by dumphrey

overall. Its significantly more stable the either OpenSuse or Fedoras, or Ubuntu for that matter. THAT being said, its quirky sometimes when it comes to install paths. But, unlike Ubuntu, building from source code is not a nightmare PITA.
I will be building it on the Debian box here shortly, so should have some more info for you by this afternoon. I got sidetracked yesterday helping in the plant and then rebuilding a computer for the end o year accounting group to use for our audit.

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