This post is not a technical post with details on installing or troubleshooting Nagios, you can use Google for doing that much. This post is a short synopsis of what you need to get started with Nagios.
Our budget for IT doesn’t include overhead for purchasing fancy network monitoring tools like Microsoft’s System Center. This is where your affable Nagios comes in to save the day. Nagios is a free open source tool, with many options to purchase already baked Nagios packages at a cost. Nagios will abate the amount of time you spend responding to tech calls or just impressing your
boss with your protectiveness when a network printer goes offline.
Setting up a Nagios Server is simple, many ways, but here is my setup:
- Download latest release of Fedora
- Install Fedora on a Hyper-V machine off your server, it’s okay to use the network switch that is exposed on your network
- Download the latest Nagios core installation (will usually be a tar.gz file).
- Setup with Apache, configure .htaccess, and login through Web GUI
Setting up the Nagios Clients is a little more work, but will pay off when the data starts to populate
- Download NSClient++
- Setup NSClient++ MSI to install automatically through Group Policy
- Configure nsclient.ini and distribute to each client
Here are the most common services that we monitor:
- Disk Usage
- Memory Usage
- Windows Server Last Backup Status
- Windows Update
- Processor Usage
This is my short anecdote of using Nagios. It’s been rock solid for 17-years now. Good to learn a little Linux in the meantime.