Network Monitoring with Nagios by Taylor Dondich
Nagios is a network monitor. I use it, and I like it better than others that I’ve tried — BigSister and some nasty Zope-based thing. By “using it,” I mean installing the BSD port and editing the config files in Emacs so that I would get an email when Apache fell over. I figure that there is probably more to Nagios.
Today’s audience poll:
50% use Nagios
10% are C programers
40% use other scripting languages
The presenter is the author of the O’Reilly Nagios book, and also wrote the Groundwork Fruity configuration plugin.
So, Nagios is about state monitoring: What’s about to break? What’s broke?
Can monitor network services (SMTP, POP, HTTP) and host resources (CPU load, disk/memory usage). It also does notification, escalation, has event handlers, and has a web interface.
10% of the audience monitor 100+ hosts; 5% monitor 300+ hosts. I monitor five servers. Apparently, the web UI falls down around several hundred hosts.
The presenter made a point of listing Nagios’ weak points, and said the he wished that other presenters would point out weak points, too. I agree — we seem to focus on features when we talk about open source. The Nagios weak points:
- initial config
- scalability
- web interface
- notifications/escalations
80% of users in the audience configured Nagios by hand, like me. This is hard! There are better ways:
- Monarch (Perl)
- Fruity
- Nagat
And some recommended viewer plugins:
- Nagcon (console based)
- Nagios Checker (Firefox ext)
- Groundwork Solutions (wrapped)
