The Fully Updated Guide to Enterprise Network Monitoring with Today’s Nagios Platform and Tools

This is the definitive guide to building cost-effective, enterprise-strength monitoring infrastructures with the latest commercial and open source versions of Nagios. World-renowned monitoring expert David Josephsen covers the entire monitoring software stack, treating Nagios as a specification language and foundation for building well designed monitoring systems that can scale to serve any organization.

Drawing on his unsurpassed experience, Josephsen demonstrates best practices throughout and also reveals common mistakes, their consequences, and how to avoid them. He provides all the technical depth you need to configure and run Nagios successfully, including a practical and thorough discussion of writing your own custom modules with the C-based Nagios Event-Broker API.

Extensively updated throughout, this edition adds an entirely new chapter on scaling Nagios for large, complex networks that rely heavily on virtualization and cloud services. Josephsen thoroughly introduces Nagios XI, the advanced new commercial version of Nagios and shows how to improve productivity with the latest third-party tools and plug-ins.

Coverage includes:

Learn how Nagios works, in depth

Master focused, efficient techniques for configuring and deploying the latest versions of Nagios

Solve real-world problems in monitoring Windows and UNIX systems, networking hardware, and environmental sensors

Systematically scale and optimize Nagios for the largest enterprise environments

Enhance your monitoring system with new tools including Check-MK, Op5 Merlin, and SFlow

Integrate visualization via Ganglia, Graphite, and RRDTool

Simplify and streamline all facets of system monitoring with Nagios XI

Build powerful custom Nagios Event Broker (NEB) modules, step-by-step

Learn about easy-to-understand code listings, fully updated for today’s platforms

No matter how complex your systems monitoring challenges are, this book will help you achieve the results you want—right from the start.

David Josephsen is the Director of Systems Engineering at DBG, Inc., where he maintains a collection of geographically dispersed server farms. He has more than a decade of hands-on experience with UNIX systems, routers, fi rewalls, and load balancers in support of complex, high-volume networks. In addition to this book, he authored several chapters in the O’Reilly book Monitoring with Ganglia, and currently writes “iVoyer,” the systems monitoring column for ;login magazine. Josephsen is just one of many thousands of avid Nagios users.