Nagios Support Forum

Hey all,

Given the fact that I am fairly new to Nagios & Ubuntu Linux, I figure I come here and throw this question out there to see who can help.

Before I dive into what I need, however, I figure I give you all a little background. I'm one of the lead engineers / project managers for a point of sale system for an agency here in NYC. In the current design, I need to monitor 1 workstation per site simply by ensuring if the workstation is UP (pingable) or DOWN (not-pingable). There are roughly 1300 sites in total. Now, I know other areas can be monitored such as disk space, memory, etc., however, all that is needed is an active monitor & trend analysis.

As of right now, Nagios is completely setup and accessible from the web interface for viewing, however, I want to get both the structure that I want down so that way I have no changes to make in the future.
1 - Create 5 groups (one for each Boro) and add hosts to their respective boro
2 - Actively monitor all sites with ping only every five minutes
3 - Eliminate everything else Nagios displays (i.e. Linux servers)

Any help at all would be tremendously appreciated.

Vincent

Have you looked into the documentation at all? The object definitions page would be a great place to start: https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... tions.html

I have reviewed several pieces of documents and have come up with errors along the way. I was hoping that i'd have someone walk me through the complexities of configuring Nagios initially then play with that. I'll go back to the drawing board and message all of you as issues arise.

Thanks for the link!

tmcdonald wrote:Have you looked into the documentation at all? The object definitions page would be a great place to start: https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... tions.html

So, just to make sure I have the terminology right - the grouping of ALL schools (in this case the circle labeled DOE) is considered a hostgroup. Then, following that, the Boro is also considered a hostgroup. In short, every circle is considered a host group EXCEPT the last circle which is the actual host. Is that correct terminology?

Typically, a Nagios host represents a single physical/virtual piece of equipment. Under that host, you may have multiple services running that you also need to keep track of. A single host may have a http server, a database, a dns server, irc server, samba share. Those are typically good candidates for services that you may want to monitor. The host itself might be "ok", but the samba server might be down which is a problem for your stakeholders.

If all you are doing is basic ping checks for everything, you probably don't even need to think about services right now. You would just set the check_command of the host accordingly. If you don't want to set the check_command for each and every individual host, you can leverage templates and object inheritance.

VincentF wrote:In short, every circle is considered a host group EXCEPT the last circle which is the actual host. Is that correct terminology?

That's one way to structure it, yeah. Depending on what you would want to get out of organizing it like that, there might be better options. I can see a use case for diagnosing regional problems more easily.

mcapra wrote:Typically, a Nagios host represents a single physical/virtual piece of equipment. Under that host, you may have multiple services running that you also need to keep track of. A single host may have a http server, a database, a dns server, irc server, samba share. Those are typically good candidates for services that you may want to monitor. The host itself might be "ok", but the samba server might be down which is a problem for your stakeholders.

If all you are doing is basic ping checks for everything, you probably don't even need to think about services right now. You would just set the check_command of the host accordingly. If you don't want to set the check_command for each and every individual host, you can leverage templates and object inheritance.

VincentF wrote:In short, every circle is considered a host group EXCEPT the last circle which is the actual host. Is that correct terminology?

That's one way to structure it, yeah. Depending on what you would want to get out of organizing it like that, there might be better options. I can see a use case for diagnosing regional problems more easily.

This reply is EVERYTHING. Thanks. I just got off Ubuntu and went to try centOS for using NagiosXI. Hopefully it'll be "easier" to accomplish this. Will report back!

I should note, Nagios XI is only supported on CentOS and RHEL - If you were trying to run it on Ubuntu you likely will run into issues.

I switched over to XI for ease of use and it does EXACTLY what I need it to do. The problem is that I have over 1200 hosts that need to be monitored and there is no "free" XI to do so. So, now I need to go BACK to the regular Nagios and just try to figure it out.

UGH - the PAIN of it all.

Well, one way to alleviate that pain would be to purchase XI :)

</sales>

Anything else you need or are we okay to close this?

For what it's worth, I'd be happy to provide you with some help implementing what you're looking for, outside the scope of the forums. I'm not a Nagios employee, but I do run a Nagios consulting company.