Installing software to work with Nagios

 

The Nagios management system provides central monitoring of all the hosts and services in the distributed network. Opengear solutions provide secure, remote connectivity to all the critical IT, communications, network and power infrastructure in these distributed networks.  They also embed various Nagios software modules and interfaces, so an Opengear + Nagios solution combines to enable technical staff to effectively provision, maintain and repair infrastructure from anywhere at any time.

• Opengear console servers can function as distributed Nagios monitoring servers extending the reach and capabilities of the Nagios system
• The auto response tool in Opengear console servers can run Nagios alert scripts at the remote site as proactive local response to programmed trigger events

Installing and configuring a central Nagios server 

The Nagios server software is available for most major distributions of Linux using the standard package management tools. Your distribution will have documentation available on how to install Nagios. This is usually the quickest and simplest way to get up and running. 

You will need the core Nagios server package, and at least one of the NRPE or NSCA add-ons. NSCA is required to utilize the alerting features of the Opengear distributed hosts, installing both NRPE and NSCA is recommended. You will also require a web server such as Apache to display the Nagios web UI (and this may be installed automatically as a dependency of the Nagios packages). 

Alternatively, you may wish to download the Nagios source code directly from the Nagios website nagios.org and build and install the software from scratch. The Nagios website (http://www.nagios.org) has several Quick Start Guides that walk through this process. 

Setting up Opengear console servers for distributed Nagios monitoring

Once you have installed and configured the Nagios central server you should then configure all the remote console servers for Nagios support. To activate the console server Nagios distributed monitoring:

• Nagios integration must be enabled and a path established to the central/upstream Nagios server
• If the console server is to periodically report on Nagios monitored services, then the NSCA client embedded in the console server must be configured – the NSCA program enables scheduled check-ins with the remote Nagios server and is used to send passive check results across the network to the remote server
• If the Nagios server is to actively request status updates from the console server, then the NRPE server embedded in the console server must be configured – the NRPE server is the Nagios daemon for executing plug-ins on remote hosts
• Each of the Serial Ports and each of the Hosts connected to the console server which are to be monitored must have Nagios enabled and any specific Nagios checks configured
• Lastly the central/upstream Nagios monitoring host must be configured 

For more details  refer Chapter 10 in the User Manual

The Lighthouse alternative  

Opengear Lighthouse embeds a lightweight configured Nagios which enables you to monitor all the local and remote Managed Console Servers (and their Managed Devices). These appliances have the Nagios Core 3.1.2 server pre-installed, plus SDT connector plugins - and they auto-detect and auto-synch with the devices to be monitored, so a Lighthouse management solution can be set up in minutes.