Black Box 1101 Nagios Integration, Nagios Overview, LES1102A Network Managed hosts Services

1101 and 1102 Secure Device Servers

10. Nagios Integration

Nagios is a powerful, highly extensible open source tool for monitoring network hosts and services. The core Nagios software package will typically be installed on a server or virtual server, the central Nagios server.

Console servers operate in conjunction with a central/upstream Nagios server to distribute and monitor attached network hosts and serial devices. They embed the NSCA (Nagios Service Checks Acceptor) and NRPE (Nagios Remote Plug-in Executor) add- ons—this allows them to communicate with the central Nagios server, so you won’t need a dedicated slave Nagios server at remote sites.

Even if distributed monitoring is not required, the console servers can be deployed locally alongside the Nagios monitoring host server, to provide additional diagnostics and points of access to managed devices.

Central site (Nagios		Remote site
server)
	LES1102A

Network

Managed hosts and

services

Figure 10-1. Nagios application.

SDT for Nagios extends the capabilities of the central Nagios server beyond monitoring, enabling it to be used for central management tasks. It incorporates the SDT Connector client, enabling point-and-click access and control of distributed networks of console servers and their attached network and serial hosts, from a central location.

NOTE: If you have an existing Nagios deployment, you may want to use the console server gateways in a distributed monitoring server capacity only. If this case and you are already familiar with Nagios, skip ahead to Section 10.3.

10.1 Nagios Overview

Nagios provides central monitoring of the hosts and services in your distributed network. Nagios is freely downloadable, open source software. This section offers a quick background of Nagios and its capabilities. A complete overview, FAQ, and comprehensive documentation are available at: http://www.nagios.org

Nagios does take some time to install and configure; however, once Nagios is up and running however, it provides an outstanding network monitoring system.

With Nagios you can:

Display tables showing the status of each monitored server and network service in real time.

Use a wide range of freely available plug-ins to make detailed checks of specific services—for example, don't just check that a database is accepting network connections, check that it can actually validate requests and return real data.

Display warnings and send warning e-mails, pager, or SMS alerts when a service failure or degradation is detected.

Assign contact groups who are responsible for specific services in specific time frames.

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