Nagios configuration fine-tuning

[froggerdata]

So I've installed Nagios XI, and added my 50 hosts I purchased licenses for. I've configured to monitor both ping and disk space, along with some important services. So I was expecting to get all kinds of alerts, as I pretty much configured the defaults on disk monitoring and such. I'm a bit overwhelmed on how to configure Nagios correctly, where it's not constantly crying wolf. I guess I have to go into each one and tweak the alerts, to where it's alerting when it truly needs to be.

I guess I'm just not familiar with Nagios yet, and kind of find the book and documentation so far pretty general. The two Nagios books I've looked at talk alot about theory, and the admin cookbook is all for nagios core.

If I were to start over, what recommendations to you guys have? I want to do this right and learn it, but I just feel overwhelmed.

[Box293]

Hi froggerdata,
A good starting point is to define services that are common to all hosts and use host groups for these services, instead of creating indivdual services for each host. This way if you want to change an alert threshold, you only change it once and then all hosts that use this service will be updated once. An example of this is a hard disk space check for C: (for Windows servers of course)

This recent forum post discusses what I am talking about.

This is just one aspect of configuring Nagios XI to make it simpler.

I'm sure the Nagios support team have some other suggestions to get you past the inital learning phase. Hang in there, as Nagios is a very powerful monitoring solution that you can tailor to your needs.

[sreinhardt]

Thanks Troy, that's a great start for them. Frogger, let us know how it goes and if you are looking for anything else in particular!