Thoughts about Nagios?

Node Man

Hi Everyone,
What are your thoughts about Nagios (core)?

Thanks!

Verities

I'm not a fan of it since you have to spend a lot of time in configuration files to get it setup and tuned to what you want to monitor. Zabbix is much better and can be used to securely monitor your infrastructure with SNMPv3.

UnixGuy

outdated but it works

networker050184

It's a bit of a pain to set up but gets the job done. A lot of peoples go to so being familiar with it helps in your career.

dontstop

It's a pig to configure the first time, but the flexibility is well worth it in custom environments.

si20

Since I passed my Linux+ i've seen that almost every Linux role requires Chef, Puppet or Nagios - i've not used any of the 3. But from what i've seen, it's almost essential to get even a junior Linux role. I'll likely get around to trying it out but from what i've seen, it looks quite complex to set up.

alias454

Are you looking to use nagios for something or just curious about our thoughts?

devils_haircut

Nagios is extremely bare bones, but if you're competent at scripting, you can make it do things for you pretty easily, and it scales well.

I messed around with it at a previous job monitoring about 600 different nodes, and it was definitely a learning experience for me. Went in knowing almost nothing about Linux, and came out quite a bit more confident in what I could do.

The stock theme is pretty ugly, but there are a lot of options out there to make it prettier. Also, you could look into Icinga2 if you want something based around Nagios, but more modern.

I'm a LibreNMS guy, personally.

Node Man

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the responses. Many valid points. It does seem beneficial for career advancement. It does seem a bit outdated and clunky with a steep set up curve (which gets easier with multiple deployments, Im on my 3rd now). I enjoy its custom-ability, reminds me of the old php-nuke frameworks.

My interest grew out of a desire to manage my own cisco lab (12+ routers switches, some servers), but once I started talking and researching, Nagios seemed like a big plus in the job market.

I have a VM server in my lab. The first 2 installs of Nagios on it were fruitless, but the 3rd is up and stable and i"ve started configuring hosts for it.

Nagios hack-ability appeals to the hacker (classic sense) in me.

Priston

I'm guessing the more detailed you get in your monitoring, the more of a pain Nagios is. So, for the people that think Nagios is a pain. What do you monitor? How many services did you end up creating?

Verities

Priston wrote: »

I'm guessing the more detailed you get in your monitoring, the more of a pain Nagios is. So, for the people that think Nagios is a pain. What do you monitor? How many services did you end up creating?

If you couldn't tell, I'm a huge supporter of Zabbix. I monitor about 80 servers and if something goes wrong I have alerts sent to my email within 30 seconds of an issue being discovered. I have automatic discovery of services configured and while its not easy to configure, once you have it setup you're golden. Or you can just import templates that others have created and save yourself time/effort of fine tuning things.