Nagios – Open Source Monitoring

Nagios in general

Nagios is an Open Source solution to monitor complex IT infrastructures. Nagios can be used to perform alive checks to ensure the availability of networked systems. It is also possible to use Nagios for performance and capacity analyzes.

History

Nagios has first been developed under the name Netsaint. Since 2002 the project is Named Nagios. The name comes from the words Network + Hagios.

The concept

The concept of Nagios is to serve a smart and stable core which can be easily modified and extended with a couple of addons and plugins.

Knowing this you may notice that you get at least two components with the Nagios core package. The Nagios Core and the default web frontend which uses C based CGIs.

This concept may also be an explanation why the default Nagios Plugins are stripped from the Nagios Package and served as separate project.

Splitting the single components in different projects leads in a higher flexibility. Each user can install components the components which are needed in a special setup. The big disadvantage is the amount of time which is needed to get a running and checking Nagios installation. Especially for beginners the first steps are not easy.