Nagios Core Administration Cookbook (reading recommendation)

I came across a very useful Book for Nagios Core.

Even though I more a fan of the Nagios XI Version due to the comfort it provides the “Nagios Core Administration Cookbook” gave me some insight into the Core Nagios and how to handle things in there.

The Cookbook consists of 340 ish pages of insight knowledge to the core configuration and provided me with ideas on how to make configurations better and more manageable.

It even triggered me to install a core version again just to play with it (and I really didn’t intend to since XI is much nicer).

Have a look here (its not an affiliate link)
http://www.packtpub.com/nagios-core-administration-cookbook/book

The Core knowledge it provides is around understanding the objects (Hosts, Services and Contacts, describing checks, monitoring methods and configurations.

A really useful how-to for starters coming new to Nagios Core and for intermediates looking for a cookbook with some solutions to uncommon questions and requirements.

For completeness here is the Table of Contents.

Enjoy reading it and getting a few new ideas.

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts
Chapter 2: Working with Commands and Plugins
Chapter 3: Working with Checks and States
Chapter 4: Configuring Notifications
Chapter 5: Monitoring Methods
Chapter 6: Enabling Remote Execution
Chapter 7: Using the Web Interface
Chapter 8: Managing Network Layout
Chapter 9: Managing Configuration
Chapter 10: Security and Performance
Chapter 11: Automating and Extending Nagios Core
Index

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts
  • Introduction
  • Creating a new network host
  • Creating a new HTTP service
  • Creating a new e-mail contact
  • Verifying configuration
  • Creating a new hostgroup
  • Creating a new servicegroup
  • Creating a new contactgroup
  • Creating a new time period
  • Running a service on all hosts in a group

• Chapter 2: Working with Commands and Plugins
  • Introduction
  • Finding a plugin
  • Installing a plugin
  • Removing a plugin
  • Creating a new command
  • Customizing an existing command
  • Using an alternative check command for hosts
  • Writing a new plugin from scratch

• Chapter 3: Working with Checks and States
  • Introduction
  • Specifying how frequently to check a host or service
  • Changing thresholds for PING RTT and packet loss
  • Changing thresholds for disk usage
  • Scheduling downtime for a host or service
  • Managing brief outages with flapping
  • Adjusting flapping percentage thresholds for a service

• Chapter 4: Configuring Notifications
  • Introduction
  • Configuring notification periods
  • Configuring notification for groups
  • Specifying which states to be notified about
  • Tolerating a certain number of failed checks
  • Automating contact rotation
  • Defining an escalation for repeated notifications
  • Defining a custom notification method

• Chapter 5: Monitoring Methods
  • Introduction
  • Monitoring PING for any host
  • Monitoring SSH for any host
  • Checking an alternative SSH port
  • Monitoring mail services
  • Monitoring web services
  • Checking that a website returns a given string
  • Monitoring database services
  • Monitoring the output of an SNMP query
  • Monitoring a RAID or other hardware device
  • Creating an SNMP OID to monitor

• Chapter 6: Enabling Remote Execution
  • Introduction
  • Monitoring local services on a remote machine with NRPE
  • Setting the listening address for NRPE
  • Setting allowed client hosts for NRPE
  • Creating new NRPE command definitions securely
  • Giving limited sudo privileges to NRPE
  • Using check_by_ssh with key authentication instead of NRPE

• Chapter 7: Using the Web Interface
  • Introduction
  • Using the Tactical Overview
  • Viewing and interpreting availability reports
  • Viewing and interpreting trends
  • Viewing and interpreting notification history
  • Adding comments on hosts or services in the web interface
  • Viewing configuration in the web interface
  • Scheduling checks from the web interface
  • Acknowledging a problem via the web interface

• Chapter 8: Managing Network Layout
  • Introduction
  • Creating a network host hierarchy
  • Using the network map
  • Choosing icons for hosts
  • Establishing a host dependency
  • Establishing a service dependency
  • Monitoring individual nodes in a cluster
  • Using the network map as an overlay

• Chapter 9: Managing Configuration
  • Introduction
  • Grouping configuration files in directories
  • Keeping configuration under version control
  • Configuring host roles using groups
  • Building groups using regular expressions
  • Using inheritance to simplify configuration
  • Defining macros in a resource file
  • Dynamically building host definitions

• Chapter 10: Security and Performance
  • Introduction
  • Requiring authentication for the web interface
  • Using authenticated contacts
  • Writing debugging information to a Nagios log file
  • Monitoring Nagios performance with Nagiostats
  • Improving startup times with pre-cached object files
  • Setting up a redundant monitoring host

• Chapter 11: Automating and Extending Nagios Core
  • Introduction
  • Allowing and submitting passive checks
  • Submitting passive checks from a remote host with NSCA
  • Submitting passive checks in response to SNMP traps
  • Setting up an event handler script
  • Tracking host and service states with Nagiosgraph
  • Reading status into a MySQL database with NDOUtils
  • Writing customized Nagios Core reports
  • Getting extra visualizations with NagVis

• Index