Nagios best practices?

[Matthew Joyce]

I think you do have the right idea except I wouldn't define templates
for each service, instead only for distinct service types.

Define Hosts
Assign Host to Hostgroups
Define Services based on Service Templates + tweaks.
Assign Services to Hostgroups
Assign Services to Servicegroups

There may always be specific scenarios where certain services are only
for specific hosts.
You have to decide whether to define a host group for a single host, I
don't.

I'm no keen on the web based config interfaces, I was scared off by the
problems I read in the forums, and the bugs in the bug trackers.  I'm
happy carving stuff from ascii.
Though, if there was a rock solid offering I might try it.

I have written a couple of scripts to help fabricate service
dependencies, useful for NRPE and SNMP dependant checks.

Also, consider using Bazaar (http://bazaar-vcs.org/) for config file
version control.
It's a breeze to setup, requires python.
After any significant changes I just run `bzr commit -m 'tweaked foo'`
and a new revision is created.


Matthew Joyce 
02 9382 0051 | IT Manager | Children's Cancer Institute Australia for
Medical Research 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net 
> [mailto:nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf 
> Of Steve Huff
> Sent: Tuesday, 14 August 2007 5:51 AM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Nagios best practices?
> 
> Hello folks!
> 
> I'd like to roll out Nagios to replace our aging Mon 
> installation; however, setting up Nagios has been more 
> difficult than I had expected, which makes me wonder if I'm 
> going about it the wrong way.
> 
> Can you recommend a Nagios best practices document or howto?
> 
> Essentially, I'd like to do as little per-host configuration 
> as possible; I'd like to be able to define service templates 
> for each of the services I'll need to monitor, then arrange 
> hosts into groups such that all the machines in each group 
> have a certain service template assigned to them (e.g. all 
> the web servers get a web_server template, which tells Nagios 
> to monitor HTTP and HTTPS service; when we bring a new web 
> server into production, I create a host entry for the new web 
> server which says that it's part of the web_server group, and 
> Nagios starts monitoring HTTP and HTTPS service on it).
> 
> I specifically want to avoid the situation where every time 
> we bring a new machine online, I have to define all the 
> services on it individually, then go through all the various 
> host group and service group definitions and add entries to 
> them one by one.
> 
> Is this a reasonable scheme, or should I be approaching this 
> problem a different way?
> 
> thanks,
> -Steve
> 
> P.S. I have tried a couple of web-based Nagios configurators 
> (Fruity, NagiosQL); in each case I end up with invalid Nagios 
> configurations, which again leads me to suspect that I'm 
> trying to set up Nagios in a configuration for which it was 
> not designed.
> 
> --
> Steve Huff - Systems Administrator, Harvard-MIT Data Center - 
> shuff at hmdc.harvard.edu
> 
> 
> 
> 
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