Server monitoring tools ...Nagios

[ronniev]

What is Nagios ?

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify,alerting you when things go bad and when they get better.

It is a fairly complex tool for monitoring the status of IT infrastructure - everything ranging from web servers to routers. Installation is a complex and lengthy procedure, and that's before you even start on the plugins required to actually make it useful!
Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well.

The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.


Features of Nagios:-

Nagios has a lot of features, making it a very powerful monitoring tool. Some of the major features are listed below:

* Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
* Monitoring of environmental factors such as temperature
* Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own host and service checks
* Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
* Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
* Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)
* Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
* External command interface that allows on-the-fly modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party applications
* Retention of host and service status across program restarts
* Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages
* Ability to acknowledge problems via the web interface
* Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
* Simple authorization scheme that allows you restrict what users can see and do from the web interface

System Requirements :-

The only requirement of running Nagios is a machine running Linux (or UNIX variant) and a C compiler. You
will probably also want to have TCP/IP configured, as most service checks will be performed over the
network.

Version of Nagios :

Nagios 3.x The most recent stable release branch of the Nagios code.
Nagios 2.x Legacy stable release branch of the Nagios code.
Nagios 1.x Very old release branch of the Nagios code.

Installation process :-

Please refer the following URL for the installation of Nagios on your server.

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/installing.html


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