Installing Nagios on a Windows Backup Domain Server

[mmcknig4]

Hello,

Is there any reasons why I should not install Nagios XI on a Windows 2008 Backup Domain Server 2008?

Mark

[hsmith]

Hi Mark,

Are you talking about a monitoring agent, or the Nagios software itself? If you're talking about installing Nagios itself, it only runs on Linux so that's going to be a problem. If you're talking about an agent to use for monitoring, such as NSClient, I can't think of any faults off the top of my head.

[mmcknig4]

Thanks for the quick response.

Not the monitoring agent. We will not be monitoring this server. I was think about installing VMware workstation on the server as this Windows server will be up and running 24/7 unlike some of the other application servers. Nagios is currently running on a Windows 7 workstation which has VMware workstation installed.

We want to free up this work station, but I wondered if it would be ok to install VMware workstation and run Nagios from there on a Windows BDC. This company is short on hardware and cannot have it running on a dedicated server.

Mark

[scottwilkerson]

This should work just fine as Nagios Log Server runs will on VMWare, as long as you still are able to allocate appropriate resources to the VM such as RAM, CPU and disk I/O.

[eloyd]

RAM. Lots of RAM. Disk space is of secondary concern, but NLS will do it's best to die at the weirdest times if it doesn't have a lot of memory allocated to it.

Having said that, we run it on a VM with 2GB RAM, 2 cores, and a minor amount of disk allocated to it for a test platform and it has never died on us. It will all depend on how much data, dashboards, queries, and alerting you make it do.

Personally, I would convince the powers that be to buy a (less than) US$500 Asus RS100 rack mount server dedicated to Log Server, since the amount of your time (which costs money) spend putzing around with VMs is going to easily be worth $500 (or more) after just a few hours.

[jdalrymple]

If the company is so small that they don't want to dedicate hardware for a monitoring instance I think it's safe to assume a small AWS instance would work. t2.micro is less than $10/month and I'd guess adequate.

[eloyd]

Watch out for bandwidth costs, especially with NLS and external (to AWS) log sources.

[eloyd]

Watch out for bandwidth costs, especially with NLS and external (to AWS) log sources.

[jdalrymple]

+1 eloyd

That's my bad. I had XI in my head not NLS. So the next question would be what logs are you monitoring in such a small environment? Not that we don't want you to use NLS for everything... but in such a small environment I'd guess your purposes would be edge case, not general global monitoring type stuff. If you just want to get started monitoring your networking environment for a SMB, arguably NagiosXI is a better launchpad then NLS is a good addition down the road and as finances permit.

[eloyd]

Wait! Blame Scott. OP Asked about XI but posted in NLS forum. So things got confused. Yes. XI works great in AWS or on a lightweight VM!