Monitoring Network

[jimruns919]

Hi. I am new the Nagios. I was looking for a network monitor that would monitor network traffic as well as what is on the network and do very basic things, such as alert me when a new IP address comes on my network for a device and help direct me a little on where my bottlenecks are as well as network issues.

Nagios looked like it could fit the bill, except I cannot find anything on setting it up to monitor my network addresses. It only see my computer as 127.0.0.1.

How do I set up basic monitoring? The only thing I found was to add clients onto the windows machines but what about my printers and switches and so forth?

[slansing]

A good place to get started is with these "How-To" guides:

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/nagi ... n/toc.html

They will cover basic system/device monitoring of the following systems:

Windows, Linux/Unix, Switch/Router, Printer, Netware, Common Service Ports

Of course that is far from the limits of what Nagios can monitor, I'd also suggest you search our exchange community site for more specific checks if the above examples will not cover them:

http://exchange.nagios.org/

[jimruns919]

Thanks. I looked at these setup guides, but it looks like, in order to monitor the computers on my Windows network I have to install a client. I can understand that for more complex features, but I just want to monitor my networks, see what is alive and be notified if a new IP address is on the network.

Down the road I will look into more advanced features, but initially, I am more interested in seeing everything on my network and notifications of added network devices.

[abrist]

Down the road I will look into more advanced features, but initially, I am more interested in seeing everything on my network and notifications of added network devices.

You could just check the known systems with a ping check (which is agentless).
Automated host additions are a bit more tricky:
You will need to put on your scripting hat.
First make a cron that runs nmap against your subnet.
Compare the output from the scan to a previous one.
Any new ips need to have a nagios config generated for them and placed in the host object directory.
Finally, you need to then restart nagios.