Nagios

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Nagios
Screenshot of the Nagios web interface
Original author(s)	Ethan Galstad and others
Initial release	March 14, 1999^[1]
Stable release	4.0.2 / November 25, 2013 (2013-11-25)^[2]
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Network monitoring
License	GPLv2
Website	www.nagios.org

Operating principle of Nagios

Nagios /ˈnɑːɡiːoʊs/ is an open source computer system monitoring, network monitoring and infrastructure monitoring software application. Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications, and services. It alerts the users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved.

Nagios, originally created under the name NetSaint, was written and is currently maintained by Ethan Galstad along with a group of developers who are actively maintaining both the official and unofficial plugins. Nagios is a recursive acronym: "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood",^[3] 'Sainthood' being a reference to the original name NetSaint, which was changed in response to a legal challenge by owners of a similar trademark.^[4] 'Agios' is also a transliteration of the Greek word άγιος which means 'saint'.

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

In 2006, a survey among the nmap-hackers mailing list asked people what their favorite network security tools were. In the survey 3243 people voted; Nagios came in 67th overall and 5th among traffic monitoring tools. Nmap itself was excluded from the list. Another survey, in 2011, placed Nagios at 69th place. ^[5]

Overview

Status reporting in Nagios

Nagios is open source software licensed under the GNU GPL V2. It provides:

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 or Check MK.
Monitoring of anything else like probes (temperature, alarms,etc.) 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.
A simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using their tools of choice (shell scripts, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
Available data graphing plugins
Parallelized service checks
The ability to define network host hierarchies using 'parent' hosts, allowing the detection of and distinction between hosts that are down or 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)
The 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
An optional web-interface for viewing current network status, notifications, problem history, log files, etc.
Data storage via text files rather than database

Nagios Agents

NRPE

Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) is a Nagios agent that allows remote system monitoring using scripts that are hosted on the remote systems. It allows for monitoring of resources such as disk usage, system load or the number of users currently logged in. Nagios periodically polls the agent on remote system using the check_nrpe plugin.

NRDP

Nagios Remote Data Processor (NRDP) is a Nagios agent with a flexible data transport mechanism and processor. It is designed with an architecture that allows it to be easily extended and customized. NRDP uses standard ports and protocols (HTTP(S) and XML) and can be implemented as a replacement for NSCA.

NSClient++

This program is mainly used to monitor Windows machines. Being installed on a remote system NSClient++ listens to port TCP 12489. Nagios plugin that is used to collect information from this addon is called check_nt. As NRPE, NSClient++ allows to monitor the so-called 'private services' (memory usage, CPU load, disk usage, running processes, etc.)

Controversial takeover of nagios-plugins site

On 16 January 2014, Nagios Enterprises redirected the nagios-plugins.org domain to a web server controlled by Nagios Enterprises without notifying the Nagios Plugins community team. In response, the original community plugin team has renamed the project to Monitoring Plugins and created a new project website at monitoring-plugins.org. ^[6]^[7]

References

↑ first release of NetSaint from the changelog at http://web.archive.org/web/20060501150621/http://www.netsaint.org/changelog.php
↑ Nagios 4.x Version History
↑ Galstad, Ethan (2003-05-03). offi "Nagios: FAQs : What does Nagios mean?". Nagios: Frequently Asked Questions. Nagios Enterprises, LLC. 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"."
↑ "2005-02-22 - Ethan Galstad". Fosdem 2005. 2005-02-22. 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."
↑ Top 6 Traffic Monitoring Tools http://sectools.org/traffic-monitors.html
↑ [HEADS UP] New project name: Monitoring Plugins https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/help/2014-January/006503.html
↑ Bug 1054340 - Update upstream URL to https://www.monitoring-plugins.org https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1054340

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nagios.

Official website

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