Nagios Support Forum

Unfortunately, I'm setting up Nagios to cover our environment in background - between projects and crises. I need a few questions answered.

I currently have nagios-4.1.1.tar.gz built and installed on Nagios001 (see attached drawing.) I also have nagios-plugins-2.1.1.tar.gz built and installed, and I've attempted to install NRPE but it fails. The OS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.4 (Santiago).

All the servers I have installed are running the same OS - Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.4 (Santiago).

I have configured to successfully perform a check_ping to all the servers to monitor them for at least being alive. (No nagios installed on any of them.) But I now have some additional needs.

1) I need to be able to monitor apl-001 for changes in size of /tmp/file1. What is the best way to do this?
2) I need to be able to monitor memory, network, and CPU utilization on all the compute-00x nodes.
3) I need to be able to run a program (qstat) on login-001 and watch the output for errors. In this case, the "qstat" is from Univa Grid Engine. However, the need exists to be able to run a program (my choice) on any node and check its output.
4) I need to be able to monitor httpd on a node for appropriate output to be able to be sure it is alive. I've tried it to the "nagios001" httpd instance, but so far have failed, so I'm going to eventually need to figure that out. But it is a longer-term need.
5) I need to know what historic data is being maintained, or that I can maintain, so I can start to do workload analysis over the long-term.

The questions I have pretty much are related to:

1) What do I need to install for it to be done?
2) How will I need to configure it?
3) Where is the documentation I can use to be able to configure things for myself? There are too many documents that seem to be just stubs, or are for older versions of the code.

I'm in need of open source solutions as often as humanly possible.

Thanks in advance for your help.

As always, there are many ways to do this...

1) For changes in a file on linux server, I personally would net-snmp to check the file. I wrote a descriuption how to do this on: http://mona.deltics.info/snmp-execute-remote-script/

2) For checking network, memory and cpu there are many scripts based on snmp to do so...

3) qstat could done by a check-by-ssh script, or even snmp as described at 1.

4) check_http is able to check on content as well.

5) You could install pnp4nagios and make sure all your output creates performance-output


1) net-snmp, pnp4nagios
2) command-line?
3) there is a lot of documentation available, there are also companies who could help you with the first installation and maybe even help you to get familiar with the installation (PM)

Thanks, Rob. Do you have specific things you can point me at? In particular, I mean what needs to be installed on the systems being checked. And is NRPE a viable solution for anything when using Nagios Core 4.1.1?

NRPE is another way to do it...

I prefer to do everything with snmp. So you would only need to install snmp on the remote device.

Thanks Rob

Anything else we can help you with, @snidley?