Book Review: Learning Nagios 3.0 - General Overview
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The book is exactly 301 pages long, divided into 11 chapters. The first chapter starts the book with a little imagination exercise. It presents a kind of panic situation for system administrators where Nagios would alleviate all of the unnecessary worries and lead the technician towards the root of the problem. Thus, the first chapter introduces Nagios, what network monitoring is about, and explains basic concepts.
The second chapter is where the action begins. The author leads the reader through the process of installing Nagios. Both of the possible ways are detailed: compiling from source code or using pre-built packages. Once it’s installed, the first steps of configuration are to be carried out: setting up hosts, services, contacts, etc.
The book continues with the third chapter, where the Nagios Web Interface is mentioned for the very first time. This is the UI through which you can monitor services, hosts, and basically your network infrastructure. You can generate reports, keep a close eye on their status, and manage downtime. The web interface isn’t mandatory, but it’s one of the most useful features, so it would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
Now that we’ve got Nagios up and running, the fourth chapter provides an overview of Nagios plug-ins in order to maximize its performance and get even more out of it. Every network infrastructure is different, and network monitoring requirements vary from one setup to another. This is where the author explains how to set up Nagios to monitor specifics such as CPU usage, HDD space, memory, temperatures…
In short, the book could be split into two major segments: the first part, composed of the first four chapters, offers a sort of introduction—a step-by-step guide on how to set up Nagios and configure it to your own needs—while the second part starts with the fifth chapter and continues through the rest of the book. This is where advanced configuration and the real technical tidbits start to shine through.
The sixth chapter goes more deeply into the notification system of Nagios and events management. Theoretically, the options through which users can be notified when a problem occurs are limitless: emails, IMs, text messages over GSM networks, even speech synthesis (via VoIP). Nagios is really configurable and flexible.
Starting with the seventh chapter, the author introduces the concept of passive checks and explains what NSCA is about. Once these concepts are grasped, it’s time to monitor some remote hosts—chapter eight covers this as well. Nagios plugins can be deployed remotely, and then it’s possible to establish those checks remotely.
Moving on, the ninth chapter gives a technical background of the industry-standard SNMP protocol and explains how you incorporate it into Nagios. It expands on remote management and adds even more modular ability. Chapter ten covers distributed monitoring, which is a bit of an advanced topic, where a huge infrastructure is monitored and a central server is used to store data. The author gives complex scenario examples.
And finally, the eleventh chapter could be considered the cherry on the cake if you are the kind of system administrator that wants to customize and fine-tune the services to extremes. Activities like writing your own check plugins and creating passive checks couldn’t be easier, since you can choose any programming language you wish. Thanks to this, there are hundreds of ready-to-run plugins within the community.
Please check out the attached table of contents below. As you can see, the title of each chapter pretty much sums up its topic in a few words. This is very useful, along with the index at the end of the book, because this manual can be used as a reference, and some time in the future you may just want to search for a particular issue. For example, you may want to refresh your memory of Passive Checks; you’ll know where to look.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Installation and configuration
Chapter 3: Using the Nagios Web Interface
Chapter 4: Overview of Nagios Plugins
Chapter 5: Advanced Configuration
Chapter 6: Notifications and Events
Chapter 7: Passive Checks and NSCA
Chapter 8: Monitoring Remote Hosts
Chapter 9: SNMP
Chapter 10: Advanced Monitoring
Chapter 11: Extending Nagios
Index
In the next section we will continue our review by analyzing the content of the book, the style of the author, the way it is delivered, and more. Click on the link below.
Next: Continued Analysis >>
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