Nagios Support Forum

Let's face it, the bottom line is that you need to know if a host is UP or Down. That's it - nothing more, nothing less.

I understand the large scale features of Nagios and it's plugins as well as the level of granularity it possesses. However, at the end of the day, we as Project System Admins, only care about if a device - be it a simple workstation or switch / router - is UP or not. If it isn't, we want to get notified and have a log kept as to see when the device went down.

Yet, here I am - a complete n00b to BOTH Linux / Ubuntu 12.04 & Nagios , and I haven't figured out really on how to accomplish this.

Granted, the web has tons of links and videos to install Nagios and all that, however, surprisingly no one has taken the time out to breakdown - at it's simplest form on how to accomplish the task that I am asking.

Enter this post - If someone has the time and / or patience to walk me through one time on a continuous thread on how to do so, I'll create another thread - both on the web and on this forum - to help out all the future n00b's that come into play.

Thanks,
Vin

I'm not sure how much research you have done, but there are several examples on the web of how to configure Nagios. If you want to just monitor a host, here's the definition of a bare-bones host check:

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ ... .html#host

It explains what the required parameters are, and what each does. The example should be more than enough to base your own check off of.

The difficulty here is that if you are, as you say, a Linux n00b, you will have a hard time both configuring and understanding how Nagios works. We could post a step-by-step tutorial of what to do but you don't understand why you do it you aren't going to be able to make changes later.

tmcdonald wrote:I'm not sure how much research you have done, but there are several examples on the web of how to configure Nagios. If you want to just monitor a host, here's the definition of a bare-bones host check:
The difficulty here is that if you are, as you say, a Linux n00b, you will have a hard time both configuring and understanding how Nagios works. We could post a step-by-step tutorial of what to do but you don't understand why you do it you aren't going to be able to make changes later.

TMC,

Thanks for the thought & link.

To be honest - I think i'm in way over my head. Actually, in my experience, I've learned how to research a little then learn by trial and error. The fact the linux is a more involved OS is definitely the hindrance from my end.

Ironically, there is no real hybrid walk-through on the web for network admin's such as myself that have a real vested interest in implementing Nagios but are unfamiliar with Linux (and all that it entails).....Believe me - I checked Luckily the project that I am on is not monitoring dependant and is be thought of as a beta-test and not a requirement. However, if I can provide a solid monitoring tool for our organization prior to our rollout - it'll make my division look like gurus.

That being said, I think the best thing that I can do is just put that out there and hope that someone would be willing to have something of like an on-time session whereby I could ping for questions as they come up, then go from there once I can see the patterns of how both Nagios AND Linux work both independent of each other as well as together. I'm hoping that it won't be TOO difficult as all i'm really looking for is a "ping" monitoring solution of a host with a static IP and the neighboring switch -also a static IP - that the host connects off of.

Our best suggestion is to get your feet wet. Install nagios, and try to to create some configs. When your brain feels like a bitbucket, you are almost there. It is at this point that you should bring your issue, including the relevant configs to the forums here and we can help hack out a solution.