Book Review: Learning Nagios 3.0 - Continued Analysis
(Page 3 of 4 )
This book also maintains the distinctive style of the titles published by PacktPub. At the beginning of the book, the conventions regarding the style are detailed. Moreover, there is a tremendous amount of visual aids such as screenshots, illustrations, tables, and diagrams.
To show you what I mean, I refer you to this sample chapter. Now we are going to examine the subtitle of the book: “A detailed tutorial to setting up, configuring, and managing this easy and effective system monitoring software.” And that’s right—the subtitle reflects the content of the book.
The author's knowledge is solid, and the book introduces the reader to Nagios. It could also be considered a how-to and practical introduction manual with various references to real-world scenarios. The practicality is increased when compared to the official documentation, for example. And the author tries to explain the tech concepts that are required to fully grasp the topics, but reduces the complexity.
All in all, even though the targeted community is system administrators, the book doesn’t require any former experience with Nagios or other network monitoring tools, for that matter; it explains things from the basics. The foundation of the book is constructed from the level of a beginner, but later it also touches on more advanced topics.
Unfortunately, we must also confess that the book isn’t perfect. The author's language is sometimes hard to grasp; every so often, spelling and grammar mistakes can be found, and that’s why the reader will sometimes need to re-read specific sentences. Sometimes you can clearly feel that the intention of the author is to explain one specific concept as thoroughly as possible, but the message that comes through is difficult to understand. It is grammar that makes the book seem tough.
Moreover, while some of the chapters are clearly very thorough and extensive, others are quite plain. But this is understandable; not every chapter affords an opportunity for lots of discussion. The sequence of chapters could be a little bit better tuned, because the “hardest” part of the book seems to be in the middle.
In short, let’s sum up what you can learn from this book:
ØWhat system monitoring is and how Nagios works
ØHow to install and configure Nagios to administer your network and system
ØHow to deploy agents and plug-ins, and monitor assets using advanced features of Nagios
ØHow to notify users of current and potential incidents to protect the availability, performance, and security of monitored assets
ØHow to configure and work your way around Nagios’ web interface
ØHow to monitor the status of hosts and services, and how to use other features to assess and prevent problems
ØHow to pass service and host check results over the network using NCSA
ØHow to use adaptive monitoring to modify various check-related parameters
