NagiosOpen Source Software Tool

Paige AsmannLI 815

Fall 2012

Product Nagios is the industry standard in IT

infrastructure monitoring

FREE software licensed under t terms of GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation

Website: http://www.nagios.org/

PurposeLibrary IT departments should provide

reliable services during and after normal business hours

Nagios provides IT staff with a vital tool in providing quality customer service and managing systems

Source: www.nagios.org

How Nagios WorksMonitoring

IT staff configure Nagios to monitor critical IT infrastructure components, including system metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and network infrastructure.

Source: www.nagios.org

Source: www.nagios.org

How Nagios WorksAlerting

Nagios sends alerts when critical infrastructure components fail and recover, providing administrators with notice of important events. Alerts can be delivered via email, SMS, or custom script.

ResponseIT staff can acknowledge alerts and begin

resolving outages and investigating security alerts immediately. Alerts can be escalated to different groups if alerts are not acknowledged in a timely manner.

Source: www.nagios.org

Source: www.nagios.org

How Nagios WorksReporting

Reports provide a historical record of outages, events, notifications, and alert response for later review. Availability reports help ensure your SLAs are being met.

Source: www.nagios.org

Source: www.nagios.org

How Nagios WorksMaintenance

Scheduled downtime prevents alerts during scheduled maintenance and upgrade windows.

PlanningTrending and capacity planning graphs and

reports allow you to identify necessary infrastructure upgrades before failures occur.

Source: www.nagios.org

Source: www.nagios.org

Nagios Use In the LibraryNagios offers complete monitoring and

alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services Nagios alerts IT staff to problem situations

Nagios provides information on outage patterns both for in-house troubleshooting and discussions with service providers.

Nagios Use In the LibraryNagios comes with several pre-built plugins

you can use to monitor common services such as HTTP, FTP, DNS, etc. Makes configuring Nagios relatively easy for

these services Nagios allows you to create custom plugins

to meet your exact needs.  For example, you can create the plugin to

monitor to service a number of ways. 

Nagios Use In the LibraryNagios provides access control through the

combination of settings in the cgi.cfg and htpasswd.users files.

Library administration and staff, as well as patrons, may appreciate the ability to see the status of the various systems

Nagios Issues Monitoring uses bandwidth and adds to the load of machines being monitored

IT departments should only monitor servers or devices it has permission to monitor

Care should be taken to avoid disclosing sensitive information regarding the network or passwords, or allowing access to CGI programs that perform actions.

User contributed plug-ins often require the installation of other software, most notably Perl modules.

Issues with Configuration All remote host have to have a configuration file and every type of service to monitor has to

have a configuration file.  Then all these configuration file have to be incorporated together to build the monitor

configuration. This can cause getting Nagios to perform the checks the way you want it to be confusing and

difficult. 

Although Nagios is free, installing and configuring has a learning curve which takes time and computing resources

Other Network Management Software Free:

Groundwork Monitor groundworkopensource.com  Hyperic HQ  hyperic.com  NetXMS  netxms.org  OpenNMS  opennms.org  Op5  www.op5.com  Spiceworks Desktop  spiceworks.com  Zabbix  zabbix.org Zenoss  zenoss.org 

Fee: HP OpenView  openview.hp.com  OpManager  adventnet.com  PathView Cloud  apparentnetworks.com  Paessler PRTG Monitor  paessler.net  Servers Alive  woodstone.nu  SNMPc  Castle Rock Computing Whatsup Gold ipswitch.com Zyrion Traverse  www.zyrion.com 

My Take on NagiosNagios would be beneficial and appropriate

for medium to large sized libraries that have an IT department

Such libraries include:UniversityPublic Government