Chapter 6. Watching

Welcome to where the rubber meets the road. Until now, I’ve talked a lot about how Nagios works and how it is installed and configured. This chapter ties together the theoretical work of the previous chapters and the details of performing systems monitoring. As pointed out throughout this book, Nagios is a scheduling and notification framework. Small, single-purpose programs called plugins do the monitoring. So an in-depth discussion about monitoring is mostly a discussion about plugins.

Nagios is limited only by the availability of plugins for a given task. Writing your own plugins, as described in Chapter 2, “Theory of Operations,” is trivial and highly encouraged, so hundreds of them are available. This chapter gives you ...

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