Nagios Support Forum

Hello again people. Is there some place that someone new to networking admin duties can go to read up on how to use some of the features of Nagios? I'm reading as much as possible but when I start messing with things like loading new plugins to XI, and then use '-h' to try to understand everything; all I see is -h -l -XYZ: half of which I have no idea what they are talking about. For example -w<warn levels> ... I don't know what that means. I mean I know that it wants to warn me (I'm installing check_netinit.pl) for the service I'm trying to monitor...but where does one go to get an idea of 'a good warn level'. Another one is -n<name in desc oid>. What??? I know I'm always looking for an easy way to do things and maybe I do need to spend an entire day reading something, then googling it, researching it for a half an hour just to know what something like -f<-eSyYZ> means, then keep reading, google some more. Just curious if any of you fine people have found a more comprehensive collection of knowledge. I have a couple of Nagios books but their older, not sure if they're much help. Thank you for any suggestions.

Boy, you are correct, that you are touching on some very... um interesting situations. Part of the issue as you mentioned, is simply knowing what you are working with and what to expect from the systems you are monitoring. What a good warning level, much less what unit type the plugin is checking in, is very tricky. To some extent its just experience, and some is always going to be troubleshooting and seeing how your machine is responding to the checks. As for individual checks, its almost impossible to give you a good answer on what various flags mean, at the bottom, I will list the most common ones though.

For instance the -n<name of oid> would be dealing with snmp, and specifically having a mib installed that the plugin can reference the short name from instead of the full oid. I am sure most of this sounds like a whole other language. Trust me, you will get it in time but it will take some time and lots of tinkering and googleing. While looking for the easiest way is not always the best, I cannot fault you for it either. What I might suggest, is to figure out what you wish to monitor, probably in small increments that are related. Find a plugin or several that can do what you want, and figure out what it uses to check that. If it's snmp, look up "basics of snmp", windows performance counters, look up "WMI and windows performance monitors", things such as this so that before you even begin to implement things you at least have some understanding of what you might expect, and a vague idea of how it could work. While it can get disheartening and overwhelming, google is a great ally, and of course we are definitely here to help as well. At this point, it seems that you have a pretty good idea of how nagios works and what to expect, and are more venturing off into the wilds of new plugin territory. Which as you found is where the real fun begins!

General flags for plugins:

-h or --help - output help for plugin, not always as descriptive as it should be
-H or --host - Hostname or address that you wish to use
-w - warning level, can be an arbitrary number from .001 to 1 million, it all depends. It is best to figure out what the plugin expects to use as a unit of measure
-c - critical level, can be an arbitrary number from .001 to 1 million, it all depends. It is best to figure out what the plugin expects to use as a unit of measure
-p or --port - Port to connect on
-i - specific IP, sometimes you wish to denote a hostname for dns but override with a specific IP to check, especially in distributed environments.
-U or -u - Username
-P or --password - password
-v or --verbose - increasing level of verbosity

That's all I can think of at the moment, and some of them may not even be an option for the plugin you are trying to use, but its a decent general overview.

Well thank you for those. I would like to slow down and learn all this stuff, but then the management freaks out if a week goes by with nothing "Tangible" done. You probably know the feeling. I'll just soak up as much as possible.

The check_netint.pl plugin is not an "official" nagios plugin, but we will do our best to help you with any issues you might run into, while trying to set it up.
Please, start a new thread if you have any specific questions or problems.