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    Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition
    Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition
    Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition
    Ebook951 pages6 hours

    Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

    By Ryder Tom

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Over 90 hands-on recipes that will employ Nagios Core as the anchor of monitoring on your network

    About This Book

    - Master the advanced configuration techniques of Nagios Core to model your network better by improving hosts, services, and contacts
    - Filter and improve the notifications that Nagios Core sends in response to failed checks, which can greatly assist you when diagnosing problems
    - Pull Nagios Core's data into a database to write clever custom reports of your own devise

    Who This Book Is For

    If you are a network or system administrator and are looking for instructions and examples on working with Nagios Core, then this book is for you. Some basic shell command-line experience is required, and some knowledge of scripting would be helpful when we discuss how plugins work.

    What You Will Learn

    - Manage the configuration of Nagios Core with advanced techniques to achieve fine detail in your checks
    - Find, install, and even write your own check plugins
    - Filter notifications to send them to the right people or programs at the right time
    - Work around difficult network accessibility issues and delegate checks to other machines
    - Tweak a Nagios Core server to achieve both high performance and redundancy in case of disaster
    - Process the results of checks performed by other machines to monitor backups and similar processes
    - Extend Nagios Core to allow advanced scripting, reporting, and network visualization behavior

    In Detail

    Nagios Core is an open source monitoring framework suitable for any network that ensures both internal and customer-facing services are running correctly and manages notification and reporting behavior to diagnose and fix outages promptly. It allows very fine configuration of exactly when, where, what, and how to check network services to meet both the uptime goals of your network and systems team and the needs of your users.
    This book shows system and network administrators how to use Nagios Core to its fullest as a monitoring framework for checks on any kind of network services, from the smallest home network to much larger production multi-site services. You will discover that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to see whether websites respond.
    The recipes in this book will demonstrate how to leverage Nagios Core's advanced configuration, scripting hooks, reports, data retrieval, and extensibility to integrate it with your existing systems, and to make it the rock-solid center of your network monitoring world.

    Style and approach

    Each chapter contains a set of step-by-step recipes to perform an example of a commonly performed task related to network administration. The book begins by focusing closely on the properties and configuration of Nagios Core itself, and gradually moves on to other pieces of software that can support, manage, and extend the system.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPackt Publishing
    Release dateFeb 29, 2016
    ISBN9781785883132
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      Nagios Core Administration Cookbook - Second Edition - Ryder Tom

      Table of Contents

      Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition

      Credits

      About the Author

      About the Reviewer

      www.PacktPub.com

      eBooks, discount offers, and more

      Why Subscribe?

      Preface

      What this book covers

      What you need for this book

      Who this book is for

      Sections

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Conventions

      Reader feedback

      Customer support

      Downloading the example code

      Errata

      Piracy

      Questions

      1. Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts

      Introduction

      Creating a new network host

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new HTTP service

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new e-mail contact

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Verifying configuration

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new hostgroup

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new servicegroup

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new contactgroup

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new time period

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Running a service on all hosts on a group

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      2. Working with Commands and Plugins

      Introduction

      Finding a plugin

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Installing a plugin

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Removing a plugin

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating a new command

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Customizing an existing command

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Using an alternative check command for hosts

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Writing a new plugin from scratch

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Implementing threshold checks in a plugin

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Using macros as environment variables in a plugin

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      3. Working with Checks and States

      Introduction

      Specifying how frequently to check a host or service

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Changing thresholds for PING RTT and packet loss

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Changing thresholds for disk usage

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Scheduling downtime for a host or service

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Managing brief outages with flapping

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Adjusting flapping percentage thresholds for a service

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      4. Configuring Notifications

      Introduction

      Configuring notification periods

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Configuring notifications for groups

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Choosing states for notification

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Specifying the number of failed checks before notification

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Automating contact rotation

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Defining an escalation for repeated notifications

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Defining a custom notification method

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Filtering notifications based on a host or service value

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      5. Monitoring Methods

      Introduction

      Monitoring PING for any host

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring SSH for any host

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Checking an alternative SSH port

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring mail services

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring web services

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Checking that a website returns a given string

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring database services

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring the output of an SNMP query

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring a RAID or other hardware device

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      See also

      Creating an SNMP OID for monitoring

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      6. Enabling Remote Execution

      Introduction

      Monitoring local services on a remote machine with NRPE

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Setting the listening address for NRPE

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      See also

      Setting allowed client hosts for NRPE

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Creating new NRPE command definitions securely

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Giving limited sudo(8) privileges to NRPE

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Using check_by_ssh with key authentication instead of NRPE

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Using check_mk instead of NRPE

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      7. Using the Web Interface

      Introduction

      Using the Tactical Overview

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Viewing and interpreting availability reports

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Viewing and interpreting trends

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Viewing and interpreting notification history

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Adding comments on hosts or services in the web interface

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Viewing configuration in the web interface

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Scheduling checks from the web interface

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more

      See also

      Acknowledging a problem via the web interface

      Getting started

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      8. Managing Network Layout

      Introduction

      Creating a network host hierarchy

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Using the network map

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Choosing icons for hosts

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Establishing a host dependency

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Establishing a service dependency

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Monitoring individual nodes in a cluster

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Using the network map as an overlay

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      9. Managing Configuration

      Introduction

      Grouping configuration files in directories

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Keeping a configuration under version control

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Configuring host roles using groups

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Building groups using regular expressions

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Using inheritance to simplify configuration

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Defining macros in a resource file

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Using another object's directives in a host or service check

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Using custom directives

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      Dynamically building host definitions

      Getting ready

      How to do it…

      How it works…

      There's more…

      See also

      10. Security and Performance

      Introduction

      Using authentication for the Nagios Core web interface

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Using authenticated contacts

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Writing debugging information to the Nagios log file

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Monitoring Nagios performance with nagiostats

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Setting up a redundant monitoring host

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      11. Automating and Extending Nagios Core

      Introduction

      Allowing and submitting passive checks

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Submitting passive checks from a remote host with NSCA

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Submitting passive checks in response to SNMP traps

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Setting up an event handler script

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Tracking host and service states with Nagiosgraph

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Reading status in a MySQL database with NDOUtils

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Reading status from a Unix socket with MK Livestatus

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Writing customized Nagios Core reports

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      See also

      Getting extra visualizations with NagVis

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Writing custom Nagios Core management scripts

      Getting ready

      How to do it...

      How it works...

      There's more...

      See also

      Index

      Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition

      Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition

      Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

      Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

      Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

      First published: January 2013

      Second Edition: February 2016

      Production reference: 1230215

      Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

      Livery Place

      35 Livery Street

      Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

      ISBN 978-1-78588-933-2

      www.packtpub.com

      Credits

      Author

      Tom Ryder

      Reviewer

      John C. Kennedy

      Commissioning Editor

      Priya Singh

      Acquisition Editor

      Ruchita Bhansali

      Content Development Editor

      Mayur Pawanikar

      Technical Editor

      Vivek Pala

      Copy Editor

      Neha Vyas

      Project Coordinator

      Nidhi Joshi

      Proofreader

      Safis Editing

      Indexer

      Mariammal Chettiyar

      Graphics

      Disha Haria

      Production Coordinator

      Nilesh Mohite

      Cover Work

      Nilesh Mohite

      About the Author

      Tom Ryder is a systems administrator and former web developer from New Zealand. He uses Nagios Core as part of his day job as a systems administrator, monitoring the network for a regional Internet service provider. Tom works a great deal with Unix-like systems, being a particular fan of GNU/Linux, and writes about usage of open source, command-line development tools on his blog, Arabesque, at http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz.

      About the Reviewer

      John C. Kennedy has worked with Unix and Linux since 1998. He has worked on Nagios as a monitoring tool for much of the past 5 years.

      He has been reviewing and tech editing books in his spare time since 2001 and has about 20 open source-related books under his belt. He believes the best part of reviewing is that he learns something from every book he works on.

      John was born in the U.S. and grew up in Northern Virginia. He spent some time in the U.S. Air Force and has lived in Germany and the United Kingdom. He has been married to Michele since 1994 and has two children, Denise and Kieran. He currently lives in Virginia.

      I would like to thank my family, including my nephews, Aiden and Mason, and my niece, Harriet, for supporting all the silly things I do and for giving me time to work on this.

      Thanks also to Nidhi Joshi whose great patience and flexibility around my very hectic schedule were VERY much appreciated. Also, my thanks go to the author, Tom Ryder. I learned a lot from the book, and it has been one of my favorite books to work on. Everyone at Packt Publishing also deserves recognition for all their titles and the hard work that goes into producing every one of them.

      www.PacktPub.com

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      Preface

      Nagios Core, the open source version of the Nagios monitoring framework, is an industry standard for network monitoring hosted on Unix-like systems, such as GNU/Linux or BSD. It is very often used by network and system administrators to check the connectivity between hosts and to ensure that network services are running as expected.

      Where home-grown scripts performing network checks can rapidly become unmaintainable and difficult for newer administrators to customize safely, Nagios Core provides a rigorous and configurable monitoring framework to make checks in a consistent manner and to alert appropriate people and systems of any problem it detects.

      This makes Nagios Core a very general monitoring framework rather than an out-of-the-box monitoring solution, which is known to make it a little unfriendly to beginners and something of a black box, even to the otherwise experienced administrators. Busy administrators charged with setting up a Nagios Core system will often set it up to send PING requests to a set of hosts every few minutes and send them an e-mail about any problem, and otherwise never touch it. More adventurous administrators new to the system might instate a few HTTP checks to make sure that company websites respond.

      Nagios Core is capable of a great deal more than that, and this book's recipes are intended to highlight all of the different means of refining and controlling checks, notifications, and reporting for Nagios Core, rather than being a list of instructions for using specific plugins, of which there are many hundreds available online at the Nagios Exchange at https://exchange.nagios.org/. The book's fundamental aim is to get administrators excited about the possibilities of Nagios Core beyond elementary default checking behavior so that they can use much more of the framework's power and make it into the centerpiece of their network monitoring.

      This also includes installing and even writing custom plugins beyond the standard Nagios Plugins set, writing and refining one's own checks, working with the very powerful Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), and the recording and reporting of performance data. It also includes refining notification behavior to only send appropriate notifications at appropriate times to appropriate people or systems, basic visualization options, identifying breakages in network paths, clever uses of the default web interface, and even extending Nagios Core with other open source programs. It includes all this in order to virtually check any kind of host property or network service on any network.

      Where possible, this book focuses on add-ons written by the Nagios team themselves, particularly NRPE and NSCA. It omits discussion of popular forks of Nagios Core, such as Icinga. In the interest of conferring an in-depth understanding of advanced Nagios Core configuration, it also does not discuss any configuration frontends or wizards, such as NConf. Finally, as a Packt open source series book focusing on the use of the freely available Nagios Core, it also does not directly discuss the use of Nagios XI, the commercial version of the software supported by the Nagios team. This is done to instill a thorough understanding of Nagios Core itself, rather than to reflect the personal opinions of the author; curious administrators should definitely investigate all of these projects.

      What this book covers

      Chapter 1, Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts, gives you a basic idea of hosts, services, and contacts followed by the summary of this chapter.

      Chapter 2, Working with Commands and Plugins, explains the architecture of plugins and commands, including installing new plugins and defining custom uses of existing ones. It also walks us through how to write a new plugin with Perl.

      Chapter 3, Working with Checks and States, explains how Nagios Core performs its checks and how to customize that behavior, including scheduling downtime for hosts and services and managing flapping for hosts or services that keep going up and down.

      Chapter 4, Configuring Notifications, explains the logic of how Nagios Core decides on what basis to notify, when, and to whom, including examples of implementing a custom notification method, escalating notifications that aren't fixed after a certain period of time, and scheduling contact rotation.

      Chapter 5, Monitoring Methods, gives examples of the usage of some of the standard Nagios Plugins sets, moving from basic network connectivity checks with PING and HTTP to more complex and powerful checks involving SNMP usage.

      Chapter 6, Enabling Remote Execution, shows how to use NRPE as a means of working around the problem of not being able to check system properties directly over the network, including a demonstration of the more advanced methods of check_by_ssh and check_mk.

      Chapter 7, Using the Web Interface, shows some less-used features of the web interface to actually control how Nagios Core is behaving and to see advanced reports, rather than simply viewing the current state information. Use of the network map is not discussed here but in the next chapter.

      Chapter 8, Managing Network Layout, explains how to make Nagios Core aware of the structure and function of your network with a focus on hosts and services depending on one another to function correctly, including monitoring clusters and using that layout information to build a network status map, optionally with icons and a background.

      Chapter 9, Managing Configuration, shows how to streamline, refine, and control Nagios Core's configuration at a low level without the use of frontends. It focuses on the clever use of groups, templates, macros, and custom directives, and gives an example of generating configuration programmatically with the templating language m4.

      Chapter 10, Security and Performance, shows how to manage simple access control, debugg runtime problems, and keep tabs on how Nagios Core is performing, and also contains a demonstration of basic monitoring redundancy.

      Chapter 11, Automating and Extending Nagios Core, explains how to submit check results from other programs (including NSCA) to provide information about external processes via the commands file, and an introduction to a few popular add-ons (NDOUtils, MK Livestatus, NagVis, and Nagiosgraph).

      What you need for this book

      In an attempt to work with a standard installation of Nagios Core, this book's recipes assume that Nagios Core 4.0 or later and the Nagios Plugins set have been installed in /usr/local/nagios by the Nagios Quickstart Guides available at https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/docs/nagioscore/4/en/quickstart.html.

      If your system's package repositories include a package for Nagios Core 4.0 or later that you would prefer to use, this should still be possible, but the paths of all the files are likely to be very different. This is known to be a particular issue with the nagios3 package on Debian or Ubuntu systems. If you are familiar with the differences in the installation layout that your packaging system imposes, then you should still be able to follow the recipes with only a few path changes.

      Who this book is for

      This book is aimed at system and network administrators who are comfortable with basic Unix-like system administration via the command line. It is best suited for GNU/Linux administrators, but should work fine for BSD administrators too. It has particular focus on the kind of administrator identified in the preface: one who is comfortable working with their Unix-like system, may well have a basic Nagios Core installation ready with some PING checks, and now wants to learn how to use more of the framework's power and understand its configuration in more depth.

      Administrators should be comfortable with installing library dependencies for the extensions, plugins, and add-ons discussed in the book. An effort is made to mention any dependencies; however, how these are best installed will depend on the system and its package repository. In almost all cases, this should amount to installing some common libraries and their headers from a packaging system. Debian and Ubuntu package names are given for some more complex cases.

      The easier recipes in the first five chapters involve some recap of the basics of configuring Nagios Core objects. Users completely new to Nagios Core who have just installed it will almost certainly want to start with Chapter 1, Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts, after completing the Nagios Quickstart Guide, as the latter chapters assume a fair amount of knowledge.

      Sections

      In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

      To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

      Getting ready

      This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

      How to do it…

      This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

      How it works…

      This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

      There's more…

      This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

      See also

      This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

      Conventions

      In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

      Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, and user input are shown as follows: Nagios Core will only need whatever information the ping(8) tool would need for its own check_ping command.

      A block of code is set as follows:

      define service {

          use                  generic-service

          host_name            sparta.example.net

          service_description  HTTP

          check_command        check_http

      }

      When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

      define host {

          host_name              sparta.example.net

          alias                  sparta

          address                192.0.2.21

          max_check_attempts    3

          check_period          24x7

          check_command          check-host-alive

          contacts              nagiosadmin

          notification_interval  60

       

          notification_period    24x7

      }

      Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

      # cd /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects # vi sparta.example.net.cfg

      New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: If the server restarted successfully, the web interface should show a brand new host in the Hosts list, in the PENDING state as it waits to run a check that the host is alive.

      Note

      Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

      Tip

      Tips and tricks appear like this.

      Reader feedback

      Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

      To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <feedback@packtpub.com>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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      Customer support

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      Downloading the example code

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      Questions

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      Chapter 1. Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts

      In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

      Creating a new network host

      Creating a new HTTP service

      Creating a new e-mail contact

      Verifying configuration

      Creating a new hostgroup

      Creating a new servicegroup

      Creating a new contactgroup

      Creating a new time period

      Running a service on all hosts on a group

      Introduction

      Nagios Core is appropriate for monitoring services and states on all sorts of hosts and one of its primary advantages is that the configuration can be as simple or as complex as required. Many Nagios Core users will only ever use the software as a way to send PING requests to a few hosts on their local network, or possibly the Internet, and use it to send an administrator an e-mail or pager message if they don't get any replies. Nagios Core is vastly capable of monitoring more complex systems than this, scaling from simple LAN configurations to being the cornerstone for monitoring for an entire network operations team.

      However, for both simple and complex configurations of Nagios Core, the most basic building blocks of configuration are hosts, services, and contacts. These are the three things that administrators of even very simple networking setups will end up editing and probably creating. If you're a beginner to Nagios Core, you might have changed a hostname here and there or copied a stanza in a configuration to get it to do what you want; in this first chapter, we're going to look at what these configurations do in a bit more depth than that.

      In a Nagios Core configuration, hosts, services, and contacts are three fundamental types of objects:

      Hosts usually correspond to a computer, whether it's the machine running Nagios Core itself, a virtual machine hosted upon it, or a machine reachable via a network. Conceptually, however, a host can monitor any kind of network entity, such as the endpoint of a VPN.

      Services usually correspond to an arrangement for Nagios Core to check something about a host; this can either be something as simple as whether the monitoring server can get PING replies from the host or something more complicated as whether the value of an SNMP OID is within acceptable bounds.

      Contacts define a means to notify someone when events take place on the services on our hosts, such as not being able to get a PING response or send a test e-mail message.

      In this chapter, we'll add all three of these configurations, we'll learn how to group their definitions together to make the configuration more readable, and to work with hosts in groups rather than having to edit each one individually. We'll also set up a custom time period for notifications so that hardworking system administrators like us don't end up getting paged at midnight unnecessarily!

      Creating a new network host

      In this recipe, we'll start with the default Nagios Core configuration and

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