Nagios
Unit 3
SYLLABUS
• Nagios Basics: Understanding the basics of
Nagios: Introducing Plugins, Benefits of
Monitoring, Main Features, Soft and hard
States; Installing Nagios: Installing Nagios
using Package Managers: Installation with apt-
get/dpkg, yum/rpm, Installing Prerequisites,
Compiling and installing Nagios, Setting up
web server, Commands, Objects
What is Nagios?
• Nagios is an open source software for
continuous monitoring of systems, networks,
and infrastructures.
• It runs plugins stored on a server which is
connected with a host or another server on
your network or the Internet.
• In case of any failure, Nagios alerts about the
issues so that the technical team can perform
recovery process immediately.
• Nagios is used for continuous monitoring of
systems, applications, service and business
process in a DevOps culture.
Why We Need Nagios tool?
Here, are the important reasons to use Nagios monitoring tool:
• Detects all types of network or server issues
• Helps you to find the root cause of the problem which allows
you to get the permanent solution to the problem
• Active monitoring of your entire infrastructure and business
processes
• Allows you to monitors and troubleshoot server performance
issues
• Helps you to plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated
systems create failures
• You can maintain the security and availability of the service
• Automatically fix problems in a panic situation
History of Nagios
• 1996-Ethan Galstad uses the ideas and
architecture of his earlier work to begin
building a new application which runs under
Linux OS
• 1999-The plugins that were which were
originally distributed as a part of the NetSaint
distribution are soon as a separate Nagios
Plugins project
• 2002- Ethan renames the project to “Nagios”
because of trademark issues with the name
“NetSaint.”
• 2005- Nagios becomes SourceForge.net
Project of the Month in June
• 2009-Nagios Enterprises releases its first
commercial version, Nagios XI
• 2012-Nagios again renamed as Nagios Core
• 2016-Nagios core surpasses 7,500,000
downloads directly from SourceForge.net
website
Features of Nagios
• Following are the important features of Nagios monitoring tool:
• Relatively scalable, Manageable, and Secure
• Good log and database system
• Informative and attractive web interfaces
• Automatically send alerts if condition changes
• If the services are running fine, then there is no need to do check
that host is an alive
• Helps you to detect network errors or server crashes
• You can troubleshoot the performance issues of the server.
• The issues, if any, can be fixed automatically as they are identified
during the monitoring process
• You can monitor the entire business process and IT infrastructure
with a single pass
• The product’s architecture is easy writing new plugins
in the language of your choice
• Nagios allows you to read its configuration from an
entire directory which helps you to decide how to
define individual files
• Utilizes topology to determine dependencies
• Monitor network services like HTTP, SMTP, HTTP,
SNMP, FTP, SSH, POP, etc.
• Helps you to define network host hierarchy using
parent hosts
• Ability to define event handlers which runs during
service or host events for proactive problem resolution
• Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
Nagios Architecture
• Nagios is a client-server architecture. Usually, on a network, a
Nagios server is running on a host, and plugins are running on all
the remote hosts which should be monitored.
• The scheduler is a component of server part of
Nagios. It sends a signal to execute the plugins
at the remote host.
• The plugin gets the status from the remote
host
• The plugin sends the data to the process
scheduler
• The process scheduler updates the GUI and
notifications are sent to admins
Plugins:
• Nagios plugins provide low-level intelligence
on how to monitor anything and everything
with Nagios Core.
• Plugins operate acts as a standalone
application, but they are designed to be
executed by Nagios Core.
• It connects to Apache that is controlled by CGI
to display the result. Moreover, a database
connected to Nagios to keep a log file.
• Consider the above example-
• Check_nt is a plugin to monitor a windows machine
which is mostly available in the monitoring server
• NSClinet++ should be installed in every Windows
machine that you wants to monitor
• There is an SSL connection between the server and the
host which continuously exchange information with
each other
• Likewise, NRPE(Nagios Remote plug-in Executor) and
NSCA plugins are used to monitor Linux and Mac OS X
respectively.
Application of Nagios
• Nagios application monitoring tool is a health check & monitoring
system for a typical Data Centre, comprises all type of equipment’s
such as:
• Server & Network Nodes
• Application monitoring from a single console
• Application Monitoring with transaction-level insights
• Monitor Middleware & Messaging Components
• Customizable Reports and Dashboards
• UPS Backup System
• Bio-Metric Identification System
• Temperature & Humidity Control System (Sensing Mechanism)
• CCTV/NVR System
• Storage Subsystem (NAS&SAN)
Disadvantages of Using Nagios
• Important feature like wizards or interactive
dashboard are only available on Nagios XI, which
is quite an expensive tool
• Nagios core has a confusing interface
• There’re many configuration files which are very
hard to configure for users
• Nagios can’t monitor network throughput
• The tool not allows you to manage the network
but only allows to monitor the network
• Nagios makes no difference between various
devices like servers, routers, or switches as it
treats every device as a host
