Black Box LES114BA, LES1332A Nagios Overview, Central management and setting up SDT for Nagios

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.

10.2 Central management and setting up SDT for Nagios

The Black Box Nagios solution has three parts: the Central Nagios server, Distributed Black Box console servers, and the SDT for Nagios software.

Central Nagios server

A vanilla Nagios 2.x or 3.x installation (typically on a Linux server) generally running on a blade, PC, virtual machine, etc. at a central location.

Runs a web server that displays the Nagios GUI.

Imports configuration from distributed console servers using the SDT for Nagios Configuration Wizard.

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