Nagios: Easy Network Monitoring

NagiosIs an open source codeNetwork MonitoringTool. It is free, powerful, and customizable. Although learning and implementing IT is complicated, IT saves a lot of time in recording how your organization's IT infrastructure works.

Validity of Nagios

To understand the effectiveness of Nagios, one or more system administrators are generally responsible for a typical IT infrastructure. Even a small company should contain a certain number of hardware that runs many services and software packages in their computer systems. Large companies have hundreds of similar facilities that need to be maintained and run. Therefore, both small and large companies need distributed operations, that is, they have scattered IT infrastructure, which is physically unable to grasp all machine information.

Naturally, each piece of hardware will run the only software product. This requires monitoring of a large number of hardware and software, but the administrator cannot pay attention to every special project. In this case, the administrator can only adopt a solution after the problem occurs by default, that is, the response-based solution. What's worse, this problem usually comes from complaints from end users, which undoubtedly raises questions about the work of the IT department.

In addition to the obvious public relations, this response-based problem solution is very inefficient. If the problem is detected early, it takes only a few minutes to solve the problem, but if it is found late, it will waste more time. For example, if it is found early, the log can solve the problem of insufficient database space before the disk space is used up, and it is easy to fix it, however, if you fix it after the system is tentatively scheduled, it will become very difficult because the log files cannot be recorded.

Therefore, an automated tool that helps system administrators perform such operations becomes a necessity. These tools are classified into network management software categories and all have the following Nagios network monitoring functions:

① Remember all servers and machines running in the infrastructure;

② Issue a warning before a small problem increases;

③ Run from a central location to reduce the need for each physical machine to solve the problem;

④ Provides an intuitive view of the entire system status and unresolved issues.

There are two main reasons that impede the widespread adoption of Nagios network monitoring by network management software:

-The cost is too high;

-It requires effective configuration for a given environment.

Nagios is an open source network management tool, so it solves the first major problem. Of course, even Nagios requires a lot of reasonable configuration, but in the following articles, I will provide several suggestions to reduce the configuration burden.

Nagios Architecture

The Nagios application runs on a central server that runs Linux or Unix. Each piece of hardware must be monitored by a running Nagios process, which calls the central server. According to the commands in the configuration file that can be read by the central server, Nagios will "stretch out and touch" Remote Processes, send commands in chess, and run necessary checks. Since the software must run on Linux or Unix, every hardware on the remote machine can be attached to a call.

According to the response from the remote machine, Nagios will take appropriate actions based on its configuration. According to the needs of remote test execution, Nagios can use the capabilities of a Local Machine (for example, to test whether a file exists) or run a customized Test Program (called a plug-in ), to perform the test and test more special projects (for example, check whether a set of special values are stored as databases ). If the value returned by the test is incorrect, Nagios sends a warning using one or more methods-Similarly, the method is selected based on the Nagios configuration.