Nagios Support Forum

Hello support folks,

I am new to Nagios but have been using monitoring tools for many years and specifically IBM Tivoli Monitoring.
We will soon be migrating a large ITM environment to Nagios XI and I am trying to get up to speed on Nagios but finding it challenging to figure out the best approach to learning the product. There are a lot of resources online but my first question is: should I learn all about Nagios Core before reading about XI, or are they different enough that this would be confusing or a waste of time? Where should I start?

There are a number of tutorials and videos on XI but they tend to be focused on using wizards and showing how easy it is to start pinging a windows box, whereas I would like to understand the internals and how to plan for the resource requirements and architecture to support hundreds of systems.

I will need to convert a number of custom ITM agents that populate historical application metrics in a data warehouse, so that will be a primary focus of the migration after the basic deployment and OS monitoring is under way.

Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated, and especially if anyone else has done a similar migration.

Thank you.
-Scott McCambly

Hi Scott,

Welcome to Nagios! We are happy to have you hear. Some great questions, I will do my best to answer them.

There are a lot of resources online but my first question is: should I learn all about Nagios Core before reading about XI, or are they different enough that this would be confusing or a waste of time? Where should I start?

That's for sure, there are a lot of resources available, I would start by reviewing all available documentation in the Administrator Guide. If you want to setup a specific type of monitoring, this is a good place to start.

Nagios XI Administrator Guide

Basic Outline For Learning

1. Get Nagios XI up and running, notification working, and scheduled backups setup. Your Nagios XI license allows for 3 activations, so I highly recommend setting up a test server in your environment for learning and testing upgrades before making any changes to your production system.
Nagos XI License Entitilements

2. Setup Users and notifications Contacts. Since XI is built on top of Nagios Core, understanding the difference is helpful.
Understanding Users and Contacts

3. Start running configuration wizards to setup monitoring. Once you have some checks running, learn to use the CCM.
How does Nagios Core Config Manager work?
Using The Core Config Manager For Host Management

Once you become comfortable with the CCM, the Nagios Core documents can really help to understand Core object definitions, templates and how things work under the hood.
Nagios Core Documentation

3. Review Agents (NCPA, NRPE) vs Agentless Monitoring (check by ssh, SNMP, HTTP). I would recommend using NCPA as we are putting most of our development efforts into this cross-platform agent.
Agents

4. Lastly, you can go over more advanced topics like passive checks and snmp traps.
Passive Checks
SNMP Monitoring Series introduction

whereas I would like to understand the internals and how to plan for the resource requirements and architecture to support hundreds of systems.

Here are a few useful guides for planning your environment.
Nagios XI Best Practices
Nagios XI Hardware Requirement
Maximizing Performance In Nagios XI

I will need to convert a number of custom ITM agents that populate historical application metrics in a data warehouse, so that will be a primary focus of the migration after the basic deployment and OS monitoring is under way.

Can you elaborate on these custom agents, and I can provide some recommendations.

I hope that helps and just let me know if you have any questions.

Ben

Hello Ben,

That is very helpful, thank you.
I will get started on that and submit a separate post on the custom agent conversion if I still have questions in a few days.

Thanks again.
Scott

Hi Scott,

I will get started on that and submit a separate post on the custom agent conversion if I still have questions in a few days.

Great! Feel free to open a post when you have any new questions.