Exactly how Nagios works?

[inventsekar]

Hi,
I have read the documentation, searched on this forum, and google... still not clear of my doubt..
We are working on monitoring infrastructure on amazon cloud, in which the remote hosts will not have a constant ip address. so, the questions is - Nagios only "collects / pulls" the information from the nodes OR remote nodes can "send" their information to nagios?
Give me some tips, clues, documents, or links... thanks, much appreciated...


Regards,
Sekar

[jsmurphy]

I'm going to give you a very cut-down response and we can work from there when your questions become less general... otherwise I would have to write a small book to answer your question.

Conceptually it might be easier to think of Nagios as a very modular network monitoring framework, Nagios prefers active monitoring ("Pulling information"). However it definitely does Passive monitoring ("Listening for information") via a number of different options, I feel it's just not the applications strongest suite. I'm not familiar with how Amazon cloud works but if the IP address regularly changes how do you know "where" a server is in order to connect? Presumably a hostname yes? You could use the hostname to do active monitoring.

If however you are certain passive is the direction you want to head then what OS? What sort of things are you looking to monitor?

[inventsekar]

thanks jsmurphy, much appreciated....i will do research on this...update my findings here as well...