Nagios Integration; Nagios Overview - Tripp Lite B092-016 Owner's Manual

10. NAGIOS INTEGRATION

Introduction
Nagios is a powerful, highly extensible open source tool for monitoring network hosts and services. The
core Nagios software package will typically be installed on a server or virtual server, the central Nagios
server.
Tripp Lite Console Servers can operate in conjunction with a central/upstream Nagios server to provide
distributing monitoring of attached network hosts and serial devices. The Console Servers can 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 Servers embed a basic set of distributed monitoring add-ons and can be uploaded with
additional customizable distributed monitoring.
Note
If you have an existing Nagios deployment, you may wish to use the Console Server in a
distributed monitoring server capacity only. In this case and if you are already familiar with
Nagios, skip ahead to section 10.3.

10.1 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 takes some time to install and configure, but once it is up and running, it provides an outstanding
network monitoring system. With Nagios you can:

Display tables showing the status of each monitored server and network service in real time

Use a wide range of freely available plug-ins to make detailed checks of specific services, e.g., don't
just check if a database is accepting network connections, check that it can actually validate
requests and return real data

Display warnings and send warning e-mails, pager or SMS alerts when a service failure or
degradation is detected

Assign contact groups who are responsible for specific services in specific time frames
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