Nagios best practices?

[Russell Adams]

My $0.02:

   Use a text editor and version control.

   Minimize and automate as much as practical.

   Try out NACE. Make a template, setup a query to find systems to
   apply it to. Don't be the administrative bottleneck when systems
   need to be added, or they won't be. Set standards and let
   automation do the work for you.

   Make sure you have two methods for notification. Email is good,
   backup IXO/TAP/SMS via modem on POTS is better (Sendpage).

   Have a dedicated UPS on your Nagios system. Power's out,
   notifications continue.

   Use a trending (Torrus) and log monitoring (Syslog-ng & Logmuncher)
   tool in conjunction with Nagios to ensure all your bases are
   covered. Tie them in to use Nagios notification engine as needed.

   Consider using SNMP for common checks on platforms with decent
   snmpd's (Linux, Windows 2000+, AIX 5.3, etc). This saves you from
   deploying NRPE everywhere, minimizing the client side software.
   (This'll start a flame war, so I'll point out you should only use
   SNMP on an internal network and use host ACL's to confine SNMP to
   read only queries from the Nagios server and one alternate for
   upgrades. ) Check out Patrick Proy's snmp plugins,
   http://nagios.manubulon.com/ .

   Choose what you monitor and how you notify carefully. Apathy caused
   by too many off hours notifications is a real problem when that
   important message goes out. I'd suggest email for all
   notifications, but SMS only for critical services in a critical
   state.

Good luck!

On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 09:30:19PM +0100, Jim Avery wrote:
> On 13/08/07, Steve Huff <shuff at hmdc.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> The relevant page in the official Nagios documentation you need to
> look for is "Time-Saving Tricks For Object Definitions".  I would give
> you the url, but for some reason I can't get to that page just at the
> moment.
> 
> An excellent introduction to Nagios which goes through how to
> configure it is the book 'Nagios' by Wolfgang Barth published by
> NoStarch Press.  You can buy it online in .pdf form, printed form or
> both.  It's getting slightly dated now, but IMO it's an easier read
> than some of the alternatives if you're just starting out.
> 
> Using hostgroups and templates judiciously you should be able to
> achieve what you want pretty easily.  My recommendation would be to
> start with a simple config and expand from there rather than trying to
> do everything at once.
> 
> hth,
> 
> Jim
> 
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