Nagios

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Nagios
Screenshot of the Nagios web interface
Design by	Ethan Galstad
Initial release	March 14, 1999^[1]
Latest release	3.0.5 / November 4, 2008^[2]
OS	Unix-like
Type	Network monitoring
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.nagios.org

Nagios (IPA: /ˈnɑːɡioʊs/) is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better.

Nagios, originally created under the name NetSaint, was written and is currently maintained by Ethan Galstad, along with a group of developers actively maintaining both official and unofficial plugins.

Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, but also runs well on other Unix variants.

Nagios is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

1 Overview
2 Nagios meaning
3 Addons and tools
4 See also
5 References
6 Books
7 External links

Overview

Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH)
Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) on a majority of network operating systems, including Microsoft Windows with the NRPE_NT plugins.
Monitoring of anything else like probes (temperature, alarms...) which have the ability to send collected data via a network to specifically written plugins
Remote monitoring supported through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels.
Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using the tools of choice (Bash, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
Parallelized service checks available
Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via e-mail, pager, SMS, or any user-defined method through plugin system)
Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
Automatic log file rotation
Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
Optional web-interface for viewing current network status, notifications, problem history, log files, etc.

Nagios meaning

According to Ethan Galstad's official FAQ on the Nagios site, N.A.G.I.O.S. is a recursive acronym: "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood". This is a reference to the original incarnation of the software under the name Netsaint. The word Nagios is a portmanteau of two words, network and hagios (also spelled agios, which means saint in ancient and modern Greek).

Addons and tools

Nagios can be extended with addons and tools. Examples of this include:

Centreon: PHP/MySQL frontend for Nagios, add some functionnalities and simplify configuration
NagVis: Addon for the visualization of the monitoring results
NagCon: Console monitor for UNIX
check_nagios_summary: check_nagios_summary enables you to do perform distributed monitoring using Nagios
NagIRCBot: announces Nagios status changes on IRC
NagiosQL: Fully featured Web-based configuration and administration extension for Nagios 2.x, using MySQL for configuration storage.
monarch: Web-based engine for the configuration and management of Nagios 1.x and 2.x
nag2web: Web-based Configuration Tool for Nagios starting from 2.x with the help of a forum
PerfParse: Database binding for the processing of the "performance data" collected by Nagios
PNP: a tool for turning "performance data" into diagrams
Nagat (Nagios administration Tool): a Web-based tool in PHP for the configuration of Nagios (development discontinued).
phpNagios: Webbased Configurationtool for Nagios 1.x-3.x without using a Database.
NaWui: means Nagios administration Web user interface. It's a Web-front-end to configure Nagios and the administration of data base entries.
NagMin: Webmin module, which a central, integrated, Web-based administration of configuration files of Nagios 1.x.
mkncf: means MaKe Nagios configuration files
Speedview: a Nagios monitor by IT=it b.v.
N2RRD: Tool for storing and graphing Nagios Performance Data
NagiosGrapher: Tool for the integration of PerformanceCharts within Nagios
NagiosGraph: Records and graphs Nagios performance data. Smaller and simpler to set up than NagiosGrapher.
Lilac Platform: PHP based web-frontend to your Nagios configuration. Supports 3.x configs. Formerly Fruity; in "Alpha" release.
Opsview: Web based configuration, SNMP trap support & distributed monitoring.
Nagios Checker — Firefox/Thunderbird extension for easy monitoring the events from the target Nagios systems
Sentinet3: Nagios Powered Enterprise IT monitoring appliance.
Distributed Nagios eXecutor (DNX): A plugin which scales Nagios by automatically distributing service checks among several worker nodes.
Nagios Business Process AddOns: Instead of single components now monitoring of whole applications ("Business Processes") is possible.
nagstamon: Nagios status monitor with popup summary in systray.