Network Monitoring with Nagios

Network Monitoring with Nagios

Monitoring your IT infrastructure has always been a difficult task. There are some common, commercial solutions; however, these offerings can get quite pricey. Furthermore, many organizations may only use a small subset of what those products offer. Many IT organizations have strong heterogeneous environments, with multiple hardware and software vendors running under the same roof so it’s important to have a solution that is flexible enough to be able to monitor these ever-changing platforms. In addition to the addition, removal and modification of devices and services, a good monitoring system needs to adapt to process change. The personnel process that follows in reaction to a web server not responding may change over time. Therefore, the monitoring system needs to change to reflect that.

When using open source tools, the preferred methodology is to pick the best tools for specific jobs. The same is true for finding an open source monitoring solution. There are numerous open source IT management tools out there that excel in the tasks for which they were developed. For example, rrdtool is used to gather performance data from devices that support SNMP; Cacti is used to visually represent gathered performance data. When monitoring the state of devices and the functions they perform, Nagios stands as the forerunner in open source offerings.