Server User Manual

10.1 Nagios Overview
Nagios provides central monitoring of the hosts and services in your distributed network. Nagios is freely
downloadable, open source software. This section offers a quick background of Nagios and its
capabilities. A complete overview, FAQ, and comprehensive documentation are available at:
http://www.nagios.org
Nagios does take some time to install and configure, however once Nagios is up and running however, it
provides an outstanding network monitoring system.
With Nagios you can:
 Display tables showing the status of each monitored server and network service in real time.
 Use a wide range of freely available plug-ins to make detailed checks of specific services—for
example, don't just check that a database is accepting network connections, check that it can
actually validate requests and return real data.
 Display warnings and send warning e-mails, pager, or SMS alerts when a service failure or
degradation is detected.
 Assign contact groups who are responsible for specific services in specific time frames.
10.2 Central management and setting up SDT for Nagios
The Black Box Nagios solution has three parts: the Central Nagios server, Distributed Black Box console
servers, and the SDT for Nagios software.
Central Nagios server
 A vanilla Nagios 2.x or 3.x installation (typically on a Linux server) generally running on a blade, PC,
virtual machine, etc. at a central location.
 Runs a web server that displays the Nagios GUI.
 Imports configuration from distributed console servers using the SDT for Nagios Configuration
Wizard.
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