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

Chapter 10: Nagios Integration
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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