Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #503945 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781593270704
• BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Review
"An excellent book . . . well written from front to back." -- Free Software Magazine, July 2006

"Wolfgang Barth has written an excellent book." -- Nagios.org

From the Back Cover
**Covers Nagios 2.0**

"WOW! This books is incredibly detailed and Wolfgang has done an excellent job. I don't think I could have gone into that much detail if I wrote a book mysel. Kudos!" —Ethan Galstad, Nagios main developer

Good system administrators know about problems long before anyone asks, "Hey, is the Internet down?" Nagios, an open source system and network monitoring tool, has emerged as a popular and affordable choice for sys admins in organizations of all sizes. It’s robust but also complex. Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, written for Nagios 2.0, but backwards compatible with earlier versions, will help you take full advantage of this program’s ability to keep systems running.

Nagios, which runs on Linux and most *nix variants, can be configured to continuously monitor network services (SMTP,POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, and so on), host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, and so on), and environmental factors (such as temperature). This book is your guide to getting the most out of this versatile and powerful administration tool.

Inside Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, you’ll learn how to:
• Install and configure the Nagios core, all standard Nagios plug-ins, and selected third-party plug-ins
• Write your own plug-ins to customize Nagios for your unique environment
• Configure problem escalation so the appropriate people are notified when issues move beyond your control, and suppress alerts during scheduled maintenance periods
• Program event handlers to take action when trouble occurs
• Monitor Windows servers

Written by a seasoned author of books on advanced networking topics, Nagios: System and Network Monitoring is a great starting point for configuring and using Nagios in your own environment.

About the Author
Wolfgang Barth has written several books for professional network administrators, including Firewall (Suse Press), Network Analysis (Suse Press), and Backup Solutions with Linux (Open Source Press). He is a professional system administrator with considerable experience using Nagios.

Customer Reviews

Best for Nagios admins who want specific details on plug-ins
I recently received review copies of Pro Nagios 2.0 (PN2) by James Turnbull and Nagios: System and Network Monitoring (NSANM) by Wolfgang Barth. I read PN2 first, then NSANM. Both are excellent books, but I expect potential readers want to know which is best for them. The following is a radical simplification, and I could honestly recommend readers buy either (or both) books. If you are completely new to Nagios and want a very well-organized introduction, I recommend PN2. If you are somewhat familiar with Nagios and want detailed descriptions of a wide variety of Nagios plug-ins, I recommend NSANM.

NSANM strengths lie in the depth of coverage of certain elements when compared to PN2. PN2 devotes 7 pages to host checks, while NSANM's Ch 7 offers 21 pages. PN2 supplies 8 pages on service checks, but NSANM's Ch 6 gives 46 pages. This level of detail can be very useful. For example, NSANM's explanation of check_squid also shows to to configure Sguid to allow access to its cache manager.

NSANM shares more information on certain background protocols like SNMP. PN2's SNMP section is about 7 pages, whereas NSANM's Ch 11 is 36 pages. NSANM demonstrates more aspects of Nagios' Web interface and the CGI programs generating pages. I thought author Wolfgang Barth made very effective use of diagrams, like the network topology explanation in Ch 4, the service checks in Ch 5, and notification in Ch 12.

NSANM includes some material not mentioned in PN2, like using Nagios with Cygwin. Sometimes the books are very complementary, as shown by PN2's discussion of NSClient++ and NSANM's overview of NSClient and NC_Net.

NSANM is lacking coverage of security, redundancy, and failover, however. PN2 does address these critical issues. Beware the some of the "chapters" in NSANM are very short -- like Ch 8 (2 pages!) and Ch 19 (barely 6 pages). I think short sections like those should have been integrated into longer chapters or moved into the appendices.

Overall, NSANM is a very good book. I believe new Nagios readers should read PN2, and strongly consider NSANM as a complementary reference volume.

The Nagios book to end all Nagios books
Every question I've had has been explained in this book. I followed the online documentation to do a new 3.x install on Ubuntu, and everything I've wanted to do since then has been explained simply, with examples, in the book.

Very details
I read the first edition of this book, it's good with explanations about the installation of Nagios, the plugins, the relation (parents, host/service dependence), active & passive monitoring, remote host monitor, and so much more. This book and Pro Nagios 2.0 (which is very good for beginner) are two must-have books for network & system monitoring.