Nagios

Nagios

Screenshot of the Nagios web interface
Original author(s)	Ethan Galstad
Initial release	March 14, 1999[1]
Stable release	3.3.1 / July 25, 2011; 3 months ago (2011-07-25)[2]
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Network monitoring
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.nagios.org

Nagios ( /ˈnɑːɡiːoʊs/) is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better.

Nagios, originally created under the name NetSaint, was written and is currently maintained by Ethan Galstad, along with a group of developers actively maintaining both official and unofficial plugins. N.A.G.I.O.S. is a recursive acronym: "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood",^[3] "Sainthood" being a reference to the original name NetSaint, which was changed in response to a legal challenge by owners of a similar trademark.^[4] "Agios" is also Greek for 'saint'.

Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, but also runs well on other Unix variants. It is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

In a 2006 survey among the nmap-hackers mailing list, 3243 people responded when asked for their favorite network security tools. Nagios came in 67th overall and 5th of the traffic monitoring tools. Nmap itself was excluded from the list. Update: The 2011 list has been released and Nagios is listed at #69. ^[5]

Overview

Nagios is Open Source Software licensed under the GNU GPL V2.

• Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH)
• Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) on a majority of network operating systems, including Microsoft Windows with the NSClient++ plugin or Check_MK.
• Monitoring of anything else like probes (temperature, alarms...) which have the ability to send collected data via a network to specifically written plugins
• Monitoring via remotely-run scripts via Nagios Remote Plugin Executor
• Remote monitoring supported through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels.
• Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using the tools of choice (shell scripts, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
• Plugins available for graphing of data (Nagiosgraph, PNP4Nagios, Splunk for Nagios, and others available)
• Parallelized service checks available
• Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
• Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via e-mail, pager, SMS, or any user-defined method through plugin system)
• Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
• Automatic log file rotation
• Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
• Optional web-interface for viewing current network status, notifications, problem history, log files, etc.
• Data storage is done in text files rather than database

Nagios Remote Plugin Executor

Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) is a Nagios agent that allows remote systems monitoring using scripts that are hosted on the remote systems. It allows for monitoring resources such as disk usage, system load or number of users currently logged in. Nagios periodically polls the agent on the remote system using the check_nrpe plugin.

See also

Free software portal

• Comparison of network monitoring systems
• N2rrd
• Opsview
• Shinken (software)
• Centreon
• Nconf
• Icinga

References

1. ^ first release of NetSaint from the changelog at http://web.archive.org/web/20060501150621/http://www.netsaint.org/changelog.php
2. ^ Nagios 3.x Version History
3. ^ Galstad, Ethan (2003-05-03). offi "Nagios: FAQs : What does Nagios mean?" (in EN). Nagios: Frequently Asked Questions. Nagios Enterprises, LLC. http://support.nagios.com/knowledgebase/faqs/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&catid=35&faq_id=2&expand=false&showdesc=true offi. Retrieved 2009-03-06. "The official meaning is that N.A.G.I.O.S. is a recursive acronym which stands for "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood"." 
4. ^ "2005-02-22 - Ethan Galstad" (in EN). Fosdem 2005. 2005-02-22. http://archive.fosdem.org/2005/index/interviews/interviews_galstad.html. Retrieved 2009-03-06. "Although we were able to eventually reach an amicable agreement on my future use of the name "NetSaint", I felt it was prudent to change the name in order to prevent any future mishaps." 
5. ^ Top 6 Traffic Monitoring Tools http://sectools.org/traffic-monitors.html

Further reading

• Barth, Wolfgang; (2006) Nagios: System And Network Monitoring - No Starch Press ISBN 1-59327-070-4
• Barth, Wolfgang; (2008) "Nagios: System And Network Monitoring, 2nd edition - No Starch Press ISBN 1-59327-179-4
• Turnbull, James; (2006) Pro Nagios 2.0 - San Francisco: Apress ISBN 1-59059-609-9
• Josephsen, David; (2007) Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios - Prentice Hall ISBN 0-13-223693-1
• Dondich, Taylor; (2006) Network Monitoring with Nagios - O'Reilly ISBN 0-596-52819-1
• Schubert, Max et al.; (2008) Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring - Syngress ISBN 978-1-59749-267-6

External links

• Official website