| Nagios is an Open Source network, hardware, and application monitoring program. It is designed to inform system administrators of problems on their networks before their clients, end-users or managers do. Nagios is a SysAdmin's best friend. Nagios is installed on over 300,000 machines worldwide, and truly is a global product: approximately 25.6% of users are in the U.S., and 30% in EMEA. Nagios can monitor everything from network bandwidth to the temperature and humidity in a server room. SysAdmins are able to use Nagios for such a variety of purposes through custom software "plug ins" and third party hardware. SysAdmins customize these plug ins instructing Nagios to monitor the servers, applications, or devices that are most critical to their network infrastructure. These plug ins also allow SysAdmins to integrate Nagios with other monitoring devices and applications like Snort and Wireshark. Nagios can also be fully integrated with third party environmental monitoring devices and remote power supplies. When Nagios detects a problem, it can notify the SysAdmin in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser. Nagios could send a text message to a SysAdmin sitting on his couch at home that the temperature in the server room is too hot and could potentially damage the equipment. The SysAdmin can then check the status of the server from home using his Nagios Web interface, and then coordinate with the appropriate facility management personnel to check the air conditioning in the server room. This is merely one example of Nagios? capabilities. The same scenario could be applied to an overloaded Exchange server, a router being pounded by a Denial of Service Attack, or a user accessing or downloading unauthorized materials.
* Contains complete case study on deploying Nagios in an enterprise environment.
* Companion Web site offers 100 working Scripts for customizing Nagios plug-ins.
* Helps organizations adhere to federally mandated compliance regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, or HIPAA.
* Details how to integrate Nagios with third-party hardware.
About the Author
Max Schubert is an open source advocate, integrator, developer, and IT professional. He enjoys learning programming languages, designing and developing software, and working on any project that involves networks or networking.
Derrick Bennett has been working professionally in the IT Field for over 15 years in a full spectrum of Network and Software environments. He has been working with Nagios since initial releases in 2002. He has also contributed code to both NRPE and Nagios codebase for new features and fixes. His work with Nagios involves small corporate installations to large Fortune 500 deployments and custom configurations.
Jonathan Gines is a systems integrator, software engineer, and has worked for major corporations providing telecommunications and Internet services, healthcare management, accounting software development, and federal government contracting. His experience includes serving as an adjunct professor for Virginia Tech, teaching database design and development, developing modeling and simulation models in C++, and software development using open source programming technologies. Jonathan has a graduate degree from Virginia Tech, and holds several certifications including the CISSP and the ITIL Foundation credential.
John Strand currently teaches the SANS GCIH and CISSP classes. He is currently certified GIAC Gold in the GCIH and GCFW and is a Certified SANS Instructor. He is also a holder of the CISSP certification. He currently does consulting with his company Black Hills Information Security. He has a Masters degree from Denver University, and is currently also a professor at Denver University.
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