n00b needs help monitoring a host

[jblakew]

Hi all,

I just inherited a Nagios Core installation with an assignment to make a change, and naturally I'm a complete n00b at Nagios. But my requirement seems pretty simple: Make sure a certain host (call it A) can resolve a certain DNS name (D.com) several times a day, and send me an email if it can't. (Eventually, we'll move on to actually making a connection to the host with that DNS name, but first things first.)

I've taken a look around, and it looks like the check_dns plugin is both there and may be appropriate for this (but it may not be!). OS = ubuntu 16.04. I *hope* the file locations are standard.

Would someone please take pity on me and tell me how to accomplish this without spending days RTFMing?

Thanks in advance.

-JB

[benjaminsmith]

HI,

Would someone please take pity on me and tell me how to accomplish this without spending days RTFMing?

We can help you out!

The check_dns plugin just uses nslookup to verify if the domain can be resolved. The man page is here:
https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/doc/ ... k_dns.html

Have you tried testing this from the command line on the Nagios server yet? The following instructions are for our enterprise product Nagios XI, but are helpful for Nagios Core as well.

Nagios XI - How To Test Check Commands From The Command-line

Once you get it tested out, you'll need to create the configurations for the host and service.

Nagios Core Monitoring Publicly Available Services

Good Luck! Let us know if you get it working.

Benjamin
Nagios Support Team