Six weeks or so ago I was struggling to discover the documentation to set up nagios on (drumroll) a Mac Mini. Yes, Mac OS X 10.8.1. I found a write up… And it didn’t quite work. Another write up covered the missing details of the first write up. Eventually I got it up and running through trial and error. It was not easy, but then again, OS X isn’t easy, neither is generic BSD, for this kind of application.
In the middle of this I was contacted about reading and reviewing Instant Nagios Starter.
I said absolutely, I just finished a very painful experience on OS X recovering Nagios information to get it up and running and a manual to just run it would have been ideal. Is ideal, actually. The first seven pages cover installing Nagios from source on Linux. Which is the right way to do it. Do not install nagios on OS X unless you are really, really bored. Or can justify getting a Mac Mini because you need to run nagios on a stable Apple platform. And are into pain and struggle. And are also bored.
Without those qualifications, just run it on linux.
From installation, Michael Guthrie runs you through directory structure on the Nagios server and getting NRPE and NRDP up and running on your hosts. Finishing up the installation covers starting at boot, what firewall rules you’ll need for your Nagios server.
The next chapter gets you basic monitoring under Nagios, including NRPE and NSClient++ (Windows clients). How to set up reasonable alerting (at this point you are monitoring your servers with your new Nagios server) and a look at reporting, and plugins like Nagios BPI to add to the functionality of basic Nagios, bringing it closer to enterprise level service.
From there you go to troubleshooting, just enough to fix the obvious basic errors. And not so much detail that you are lost.
This book is the writeup I wished I had done while setting up previous nagios installations. It covers enough to grab the software and get you up and running in a few hours. Nothing extra, but thorough coverage – better yet, thorough accurate coverage – of the basics. Follow this and do it right the first time and the extensive troubleshooting won’t be needed.
Now if I can just get the 26,184 alerts cleared out of my monitoring folder…
— doug