Nagios Network Monitoring System - Open-Source Software For Linux And *Nix OSs
You can find many varieties of network monitoring systems on the Web. One of them is the Nagios network monitoring system. It is open-source software devised for Linux and many *nix variants of operating systems.
In this article, we will tell you some details about this powerful network monitoring system.
Nagios informs you of problems in your network before your clients, managers, or end-users can do so. It is host and network service monitor software. It is modular software. It uses external plugins to check on those services and hosts that you specify through a monitoring daemon. Status related information is then relayed back to Nagios by the daemon.
The daemon uses e-mail, IM, and SMSs to notify administrative contacts in case any problems in the network are identified by it. You can then use a Web browser to access reports, historical logs, and current status information that pertain to various services. Some of its features include monitoring of network services such as SMTP, POP3, NNTP, PING, and HTTP. Host resources that it can monitor include processor load, running processes, log files, memory and disk usage. It can monitor ambient temperature. You can use your own plugins to implement your own host and network service checks. Nagios helps you find unreachable hosts as well as those that are down. Nagios knows how to distinguish between these two categories of hosts. Nagios can also notify status information that pertains to various network services and hosts to different groups of contacts. Nagios is equipped with an external command interface that helps you modify notification and monitoring behavior through event handlers, third-party applications, or the Web interface, whenever required. Such event handlers can be defined by Nagios to help you to run them for problem resolution during host or service events. Nagios retains data that pertains to network services status and hosts even after the program restarts. During maintenance breaks, Nagios suppresses service and host notifications. Nagios has the capability to even acknowledge problems courtesy the Web interface. With Nagios, you can use an authorization mechanism to restrict users from certain views as also certain actions. System requirements for Nagios to work are a computer equipped with Linux or *nix variant of operating system and a C compiler. You will also need to configure TCP/IP.. You can easily download the Nagios Network monitoring system from the Nagios Web site. The most difficult part about Nagios is its proper configuration. Everything that you desire to accomplish with Nagios needs to be defined in a file from scratch. Further, you will find that you need to reduce your host groups to fewer machines as exceptions become more and more. The Nagios network monitoring system may not be the best that you may desire, but it is definitely better than any alternatives that you may currently have at your disposal.
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