Monitoring Tool-Nagios

NAGIOS

Nagios is an open source tool specially developed to monitor host and services. This monitors Unix, Linux and Microsoft windows OS’s and network appliances which supports SNMP protocol.

It is designed to inform network incidents before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well.

Initially developed for servers and application monitoring, it is now widely used to monitor networks availability. It is possible with the development of specific plugins around Nagios process.

Nagios works with a set of “plugins” to provide local and remote service status. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external “plugins” which return status information to Nagios.

When incidents are detected, the daemon send notifications to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.).

Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a Web browser.

Custom “plugins” are relatively easy to develop

Different methods are provided for remote resource discovery

Nagios is freely available from http://www.nagios.org

Nagios tool provide monitoring facilities (polling elements at regular intervals and generating events depending on polling return status. Nagios can be considered as a scheduler, which execute plugins, analyse results and obtain a status about each element concerned.

Nagios can be configured to monitor anything that you can write a script for (Perl scripts, Shell, programs,).

Nagios comes with loads of plugins for just about every normal known service such as SNMP,ORACLE,MYSQL,SSH, HTTP, NFS, FTP, etc, etc.

The advantages of Nagios against other manufacturer products are:

1. It is a free product, running on Linux OS
2. It is an easy to use product, including all functions needed to perform availability monitoring. Extensions (plugins) are simple to develop, using well known languages
3. It is scalable, and it is possible to deploy a hierarchy of Nagios servers to provide consolidated views of network and / or system availability.

The platform shall nevertheless be integrated in an operational environment with all its constraints.