Nagios

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Nagios
Nagios main screen.png
Screenshot of the Nagios web interface
Original author(s) Ethan Galstad
Initial release March 14, 1999[1]
Stable release 3.2.0 / 2009-08-12; 3 months ago[2]
Operating system Unix-like
Type Network monitoring
License GNU General Public License
Website www.nagios.org

Nagios (pronounced /ˈnɑːdʒioʊs/) is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better.

Nagios, originally created under the name NetSaint, was written and is currently maintained by Ethan Galstad, along with a group of developers actively maintaining both official and unofficial plugins. N.A.G.I.O.S. is a recursive acronym: "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood"[3], "Sainthood" being a reference to the original name of the software, which was changed in response to a legal challenge by owners of a similar trademark.[4] "Agios" is also modern Greek for saint.

Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, but also runs well on other Unix variants. It is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Contents

[edit] Overview

  • Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH)
  • Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) on a majority of network operating systems, including Microsoft Windows with the NSClient++ plugin.
  • Monitoring of anything else like probes (temperature, alarms...) which have the ability to send collected data via a network to specifically written plugins
  • Monitoring via remotely-run scripts via Nagios Remote Plugin Executor
  • Remote monitoring supported through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels.
  • Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using the tools of choice (shell scripts, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
  • Plugins available for graphing of data (Nagiosgraph, Nagiosgrapher, PNP4Nagios, and others available)
  • Parallelized service checks available
  • Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, 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 e-mail, pager, SMS, or any user-defined method through plugin system)
  • Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
  • Automatic log file rotation
  • Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
  • Optional web-interface for viewing current network status, notifications, problem history, log files, etc.

[edit] See also

Free software portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ first release of NetSaint from the changelog at http://web.archive.org/web/20060501150621/http://www.netsaint.org/changelog.php
  2. ^ Nagios 3.x Version History
  3. ^ Galstad, Ethan (2003-05-03). "official FAQ Nagios: FAQs : What does Nagios mean?" (in EN). Nagios: Frequently Asked Questions. Nagios Enterprises, LLC. http://support.nagios.com/knowledgebase/faqs/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&catid=35&faq_id=2&expand=false&showdesc=true official FAQ. Retrieved 2009-03-06. "The official meaning is that N.A.G.I.O.S. is a recursive acronym which stands for "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood"." 
  4. ^ "2005-02-22 - Ethan Galstad" (in EN). Fosdem 2005. 2005-02-22. http://archive.fosdem.org/2005/index/interviews/interviews_galstad.html. Retrieved 2009-03-06. "Although we were able to eventually reach an amicable agreement on my future use of the name "NetSaint", I felt it was prudent to change the name in order to prevent any future mishaps." 

[edit] Books

[edit] External links

[edit] Support sites

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