Nagios
 Nagios is a host and
service monitor designed to inform you of network
problems.
The monitoring daemon runs periodic checks on hosts and
services specified using external "plugins" which return status
information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can
send
notifications out 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.
Although Nagios is powerful and flexible, it does require some
time for it to be installed and configured correctly.
Features include:
- Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP,
PING, etc.)
- Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and
memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
- Monitoring of environmental factors such as temperature
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop
their own host and service checks
- Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing
detection
of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are
unreachable
- Contact notifications when service or host problems occur
and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)
- Optional escalation of host and service notifications to
different contact groups
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service
or host events for proactive problem resolution
- Support for implementing redundant and distributed
monitoring servers
- External command interface that allows on-the-fly
modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior
through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party
applications
- Retention of host and service status across program
restarts
- Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service
notifications during periods of planned outages
- Ability to acknowledge problems via the web interface
- Web interface for viewing current network status,
notification and problem history, log file, etc.
- Simple authorization scheme that allows you restrict what
users can see and do from the web interface
- Automatic log file rotation/archiving
Return
to System Monitoring Home Page
Nagios also features in our
'Linux
Equivalents to Windows Software' section. The category
selector below
allows you to filter the different types of software included in that
separate article.
Last Updated Tuesday, August 11 2009 @ 04:49 PM EDT
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