Nagios

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better, through Web Based Interface.

Nagios Plugins helps you monitor Sevices for Windows and Linux Systems on your network.

What do you need to run Nagios ?

A Linux System.
Web Server - Preferably Apache
Thomas Boutell's GD Library 1.6.3 or Higher (http://www.boutell.com/gd)

What do you need to download ?

Download Nagios Stable version from www.nagios.org
At the time of writing this doc I had downloaded nagios-1.3.tar.gz

Then you need to Download additional plugins.

Let me explain these plugins in detail :

You will need to download 3 Types of plugins

1) nagios-plugins-1.4.2.tar

This will have all the necessary commands to excecute and check status of services under the libexec directory.

2) NRPE - nagios-nrpe_2.0.orig.tar.gz

Daemon and plugin for executing plugins on remote hosts

3) Nsclient - nsclient_201.zip

To Monitor Win2k/NT Systems on your network you need to install nsclient addon from :

http://nsclient.ready2run.nl/


Step by Step Look at Configuring Nagios

1) Install Nagios
2) Install Plugins
3) Configure Web Interface.
4) Configure .htaccess for Password Authentication
5) Understanding the Configuration Files
6) Editing the Necessary .CFG Configuration files
7) Configure NRPE daemon on the remote hosts - Linux
8) Configure NSclient on remote hosts - Windows

Note : There are other Web Based tools available to configure Nagios such as

Nagat - is a PHP interface for managing Nagios

Nagmin - is a plugin for Webmin that can be used to manage Nagios

Nagiosweb - is a PHP/MySQL frontend for Nagios configuration.

Although I have used the backend to configure Nagios, you may try using anyone of the above.