User Manual
9
NAGIOS INTEGRATION
Nagios is a powerful, highly extensible open source tool for monitoring network hosts and services. The
core Nagios software package is installed the central Nagios server.
Console servers operate in conjunction with a central/upstream Nagios server to provide distributing
monitoring of attached network hosts and serial devices. They embed the NSCA (Nagios Service Checks
Acceptor) and NRPE (Nagios Remote Plug-in Executor) add-ons – this allows them to communicate with
the central Nagios server, eliminating the need for a dedicated slave Nagios server at remote sites.
The console server products all support distributed monitoring. Even if distributed monitoring is not
required, the Console servers can be deployed locally alongside the Nagios monitoring host server, to
provide additional diagnostics and points of access to managed devices.
NOTE
If you have an existing Nagios deployment, you may wish to use the console server gateways in a
distributed monitoring server capacity only. If this case and you are already familiar with Nagios,
skip ahead to section 9.3.
9.1
Nagios Overview
Nagios provides central monitoring of the hosts and services in your distributed network. Nagios is freely
downloadable, open source software. This section offers a quick background of Nagios and its
capabilities. A complete overview, FAQ and comprehensive documentation are available at:
http://www.nagios.org
Nagios forms the core of many leading commercial system management solutions such as GroundWork:
http://www.groundworkopensource.com
Nagios provides an outstanding network monitoring system. With Nagios you can:
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Display tables showing the status of each monitored server and network service in real time
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Use a wide range of freely available plug-ins to make detailed checks of specific services – e.g.
check that a database can validate requests and return real data
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Display warnings and send warning e-mails, pager or SMS alerts when a service failure or
degradation is detected
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Assign contact groups who are responsible for specific services in specific time frames
