How to Setup and configure Nagios

1.0 About Nagios

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, and provides critical notifications to administrators, when the system/network performance is being negatively impacted.

Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, but it possessess the capability of being compatible with a host of other OSs as well.

Some of the many features of Nagios include:

• Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)

• Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)

• Simple plug-in design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks

• Parallelized service checks

• Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, 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 user-defined method)

• Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution

• Automatic log file rotation

• Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts

• Optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.