I managed a web design and hosting company several years ago. When
we began to experience the first of many growth spurts, we were adding
servers to our infrastructure at a rate of one to three servers per
quarter. Knowing the details about what was happening on all of those
servers, as well as the applications and infrastructure in general,
quickly became my primary concern and responsibility.
I consulted with the Datacenter staff and other hosting professionals
regarding server monitoring, and the application most recommended was
Nagios. But along with the recommendation, came the warnings that
Nagios might be a pain in the ass to setup and maintain. Back then,
when Nagios was in its infancy, the warnings were quite appropriate!
But the flexibility that it offered and the intelligence that it
returned made editing the countless configuration files well worth it!
Today there are many books and videos that explain Nagios' installation
and configuration in detail, and self-paced training is available by
subscription for only $200 per year.
Nagios streamlines the overall monitoring of Ping, Power and Pipe,
while paying specific attention to areas like: CPU, Memory, Disks, SNMP
Service, Network Switches, Routers, Firewalls, Services, DNS, DHCP,
Active Directory, Exchange Services, HTTP Status, FTP Status, OpenManage
Status, Total Running Processes, Programs running on servers and other
host resources and application states.
The system can be extended with customized host and service checks.
It includes e-mail, pager, and other notification features, and a web
interface streamlines access to network status, problem history, and log
information.
Nagios is a Linux platform product. Nagios Enterprise also provides
clients with open source Nagios development, customization, integration,
and optimization services. Originally created under the name NetSaint,
the Nagios application was written and is currently maintained by Ethan
Galstad, along with a group of developers actively maintaining both
official and unofficial plugins.
Nagios Key Strengths
- Nagios is a popular open source network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting
users when things go wrong and again when they get better.
- Nagios is the industry standard in enterprise-class monitoring for
good reason. It allows you to gain insight into your network and
infrastructure and fix problems before customers know they even exist.
It’s stable, scalable, supported, and extensible.
- In many data center environments, Nagios has become the de facto
standard for companies in need of an open source, fault-tolerant
solution to monitor single points of failure, service-level agreement
(SLA) shortcomings, servers, redundant communication connections or
environmental factors.
- Nagios has been downloaded more than 660,000 times since 2001. More
than any other application, the Nagios open source components are in use by more than 50 open source customers—and
the number is rapidly growing. A powerful and flexible monitoring tool,
Nagios has nearly limitless configuration options, making installation
and configuration a dynamic, robust proposition for systems
administrators.
- Nagios Enterprise offers professional support services for Nagios.
Working in combination with its partners, Nagios can provide you and
your organization with access to a variety of support options for
Nagios, including Installation support, Incident-based support, 24×7
support contracts, and Customized support plans.
Software Highlights
- Supports Comprehensive Network Monitoring for Windows, Linux/Unix,
routers, switches, firewalls, printers, services, and applications.
- Gives you Immediate awareness and insight, letting you receive
immediate notifications of problems via email, pager and cell phone.
- Provides problem remediation that lets you acknowledge problems
through web interface and automatically restart failed applications.
- Supports proactive planning, letting you schedule downtime for anticipated host, service, and network upgrades.
- Offers robust reporting options, including SLA availability reports,
alert and notification history reports, and trending analysis.
- Offers multi-tenant/multi-user capabilities, multiple users can access the web interface.
- Provides smooth, easy integration with your existing applications.
- Delivers a stable, reliable, and respected platform.
We live in a “plug & play” world where people expect instant
results. Nagios is not a “plug & play” application. Every Data
Center is different. We have volumes of “Best Practices” to guide us in
the design and management of our facilities. The shear diversity of
devices and applications that make up our ever changing Infrastructure
requires an application with a great deal of flexibility if it is to
succeed at monitoring and reporting on the status of everything in our
environments.
“Those who fail to plan, plan to fail” Nagios is
not difficult to install. It is not difficult to configure. It is not
difficult to maintain. The key to deploying a successful Nagios
installation is planning. Deploying Nagios is not a one person task,
but a project requiring the involvement of one or more departments
within your organization.
You need to have a thorough understanding of your Infrastructure:
- What hardware do you need to monitor?
- Can the hardware be classified into specific groups?
- Can the services being provided by the hardware be classified into specific groups?
- How many locations do you need to monitor? Nagios can be configured to provide distributed monitoring.
- Which people are to be assigned the responsibility of addressing issues belonging to each specific hardware group?
- Which people are to be assigned the responsibility of addressing issues belonging to each specific service group?
- Do you have up-to-date contact information, including e-mail, mobile phone and home phone numbers?
- What will be the notification hierarchy? Who will get notified first, who will get notified next?
- Will you need to integrate with your trouble ticket and request
handling system? Nagios integrates well with OTRS, RT, OSTicket, iTop,
Service-Now.com and Atlassian JIRA.
- Are you considering using SNMP to query the status of your devices?
If so, you need to investigate which MIBs will be required for each
piece of hardware, and whether or not they will return the information
that you are seeking.
Deploying an Enterprise Monitoring System is a complex project. Your
choice to use Nagios, or Nagios-based applications, versus applications
like Zenoss, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Cacti, Ganglia or Munin should be based
on how well each is able to meet all of your requirements, rather than
how easy it is to deploy.
Other considerations should be:
- How easy is it to get support?
- How active and up-to-date are the on-line communities?
- How much information and training resources are available?
- How easy is it to move from the Open Source to the Commercial version?
- Will it deliver the data in all of the forms and formats that are required?
- Will it integrate with your existing applications like Splunk, Jira, OTRS, Puppet, OpsGenie or Active Directory?
- How extensible is the application? How easily does it adapt to change?
Clearly, there is a lot of consideration and planning involved before
reaching a decision regarding your best choice for Enterprise
Monitoring. Choosing such a critical component for your Infrastructure
shouldn't be easy, like Senate confirmation hearings shouldn't be
easy. We all want the right man for the job, and we'll ask thousands of
questions and leave no stone unturned in our investigations. Nagios is
not easy. In most cases however, it is the best tool-set for the job.
Nagios is a great application as it stands for Enterprise Monitoring,
and there are several companies that have built their own applications
using Nagios at the core. Their products add to an already extensive
feature set, while maintaining compatibility with existing Nagios
plug-ins. One such company is Opsview. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in the USA and India, their flagship product smooths out the complexities of deploying Nagios. Opsview is used globally by many enterprise customers
including blue chip organizations such as Comcast, BT Plusnet, Blue
Cross Blue Shield, Siemens, Allianz, US Army, Irish Revenue and Yale
University to name just a few.
All things considered. You should give Nagios and Opsview your full
attention. Other companies are, and perhaps one or more of them are
amongst your competition, and they couldn't possibly be any smarter than
you. Could they?
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
I spend about 3 weeks vetting through 20+ open source monitoring solutions and at the end of the process, the choices had boiled down to few major ones - OMD (best combination of open source plug-ins put together for Nagios), Zabbix, and Zenoss.
I wrote a blog post describing the experience in more details. I am adding more visual stuff to the post but 80% of the content is there.
blog.unicsolution.com