Customer Reviews

Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I use Nagios heavily at my company and as a result, I've purchased all of the available texts on the subject. This one is simply the best work on Nagios available right now. It's clear and succinct where even the online docs from the Nagios project can be confusing. It covers things that the No Starch volume barely touches on (WMI Scripting and Nagios) and honestly, the diagrams and code samples are clear and useful in real-world application.

Really, buy this one. If you need another one, I would be surprised.

Nagios already has extensive online documentation and one of the best and most active communities, so why do you need this book? You need it because it is most assuredly not an attempt to simply rehash existing documentation.

This book does a great job of addressing the challenges involved in deploying Network Monitoring generally, and then providing the reasons why Nagios is the best choice for providing the needed functionality, and how to go about making sure your implementation is a success.

Best of all it is not a dry technical reference tome. Such things have their place, but what seems to be more lacking in a lot of systems administrators is a deeper more cohesive understanding of how it all works together, and why it works that way. This book presents that information in a way that is easy to read. The author's personality quite clearly shines through in most of the book, making it rather easy and even enjoyable reading. Something that sadly is often lacking in many of todays over-edited technical works.

The author punctuates his points where necessary with easily understood examples that drive the point home, and help to communicate the scope of the issue with potential impacts. Most any seasoned Nagios administrator will recognize at least variants on many of the examples he uses as incidents from their own history.

One other point worthy of mentioning is that he is quite clearly not afraid of the manual administration of Nagios. There is a weird trend among some *nix administrators these days that says if you can't click through a few forms and be done then it's too hard. This book not only doesn't shy away from this, it takes the time to explain why this is exactly what we don't want.

If I could recommend improvements for this book, it would be to include a full case study on deploying Nagios in an environment. Mapping the network, examples of the management involvement he describes, the structure and content of the resulting config files and notification schemes, and so on. Perhaps then with a series of changes describing the way Monitoring systems tend to change over time. Responding to needs for an on-call rotation, people whining about the number and types of pages they receive, etc. Perhaps the addition of another network segment or location, or a recurring situation that requires the creation of an event handler to manage. This would round out the end of the book well and help to draw all the presented concepts together for the reader.

Regardless, if you're thinking, are in the middle of, or have already implemented a monitoring system I highly recommend this work. Even seasoned Nagios administrators may benefit from the reading of alternative approaches and more recent features available through Nagios - such as performance metrics and the event broker.

Main benefit of this book is that it will teach you many things in a short time. You might want to purchase it if you want a quick start on Nagios, and don't plan to use Nagios on larger systems. Also, although the author's (brief?) style has some benefits, it also has some drawbacks.

Things like distributed monitoring, fail-over, passive checks,... are barely touched. If you are installing Nagios for the first time, you probably won't miss these subjects elaborated, because you will want to have it running soon as possible. However, I think the Apress book covers these advanced topics much better, and gives a more comprehensive overview of Nagios. The decision is up to you. I preferred the lengthier book with more things explained, although it was a bit harder to read.

One more thing that I disliked was that for Passive checks author references Chapter 2. I couldn't find anything about passive checks there, so I checked the Index. No mention of them there either. I gave this book a relatively bad review due to this kind of unclear issues and for the lack of distributed monitoring and failover coverage, which I think is very important for a monitoring system in a serious installation.

As said, some things are better in this book than in Apress one (like ie. Windows check explanation), but in general, Apress book left a better impression on me.

I bought this book to learn Nagios from scratch to help me set up a reliable monitoring system for our live network.

Before this book all I knew about Nagios was that it was supposed to be difficult to configure (lots of people told me this). Whilst I was reading this book I thought everything was very easy and straight forward. When I was nearing the end I was thinking "hold on there isn't much left in this book, when does it get hard?" It doesn't! Nagios is easy and this book shows you how to quickly setup a basic monitoring system. No messing about concise and to the point.

I had my base nagios system running within a few hours, checking the load, memory, disk space, ping, on all my servers (Linux and Windows), switches, routers, etc. With SMS alerts going to the on call engineer according to time and date conditions etc.

If you are comfortable with Linux and configs then Nagios is a piece of cake with this book.

The only thing that I found helpful not in the Nagios documentation is the scripting piece. It provides good ideas for creating nagios configs for large environment quickly. I was looking for at least a detailed information on integrating it with a third party rrd tool such as cacti for creating trends based on historical data.

It's well written, but it didn't provide much more insights and coverage than reading the existing documentation you can download for free. There are also some glaring gaps in its coverage. There's nothing about passive checks! And I don't think it was written before v3.0 came out.

If you like written docs for stuff you reference often, it will be worth the money. But don't go to it with any significant troubleshooting problem.

Let me start out by saying if your looking for a single book to get your new Nagios monitoring system installed, configured and running then this probably isn't the book for you. That said, this book is a definite worthwhile addition to your Nagios library. It provides some much needed real world knowledge and examples about additional configuration options and performance optimizing tweaks for your existing Nagios system. The book is well written and organized into easy to follow sections without bogging down the reader with an over abundance of technical terms or background. After reading this book your sure to have one or more of those "I never thought of using Nagios for that" type of moments where it suddenly opens a new door for what Nagios is really capable of doing.

--- DISCLAIMER: This is a requested review by PTR, however any opinions expressed within the review are my personal ones. ---

Introduction - 6p
CHAPTER 1 Best Practices - 12p
CHAPTER 2 Theory of Operations - 26p
CHAPTER 3 Installing Nagios - 11p
CHAPTER 4 Configuring Nagios - 23p
CHAPTER 5 Bootstrapping the Configs - 10p
CHAPTER 6 Watching - 46p
CHAPTER 7 Visualization - 42p
CHAPTER 8 Nagios Event Broker Interface - 19p
APPENDIX A Configure Options - 3p
APPENDIX B nagios.cfg and cgi.cfg - 9p
APPENDIX C Command-Line Options - 10p
Index - 14p

The book is with 190 pages (230p. when including appendix and index) very compact. It teaches you Nagios in a way I have never heard / read before. I must assume that the authors clear structured style - which runs through the book like a red line - must be responsible for the excellent outcome.

The book starts in the introduction with the title "Do it right the first time" and that hits it right on the spot. What make out the features of this little portable knowledgebase is the exceptional well thought through contents and its explanations by the author. David is not filling pages by explaining each and every parameter, but rather showing you the big picture, and explaining how to approach new issues or how one technical solution is better over another.

This is the book you should pass to your manager so (s)he understands why and how an open solution like Nagios is the better choice and can be used for achieving surpassing solutions.


The book itself basically is divided in two sections:

Background, setup and configuration - Chapters 1-5
Advanced Topics - Chapters 6-8


I did find any of the chapters to have a nice balance of the amount of information needed but some EXCEPTIONAL good parts of book where:

Chapter 1 Best practices
Chapter 2 - the part about scheduling
Chapters 6-8 as a whole

Chapter 6 has a thorough explanations on monitoring the different OS's (especially the Windows part !!) or other applications.

Chapter 7 for its overall thoroughness of how to visualize your data to reach the next level of a better understanding of the systems / network you are monitoring.

Chapter 8 is describing a filesystem based status interface. The NEB module will write a file with its current status code for each service. I have to admit that some technical details went over my head, but I thought that was pretty cool !!


The featured points above is what I found to be exceptionally good and most likely the strongest sales points for this little portable knowledgebase. That doesnt mean that the other not mentioned parts of the book are weak, mind you.

Funny enough the above mentioned points where EXACTLY the points which I havent seen explained this thorough anywhere before.

So David's book was exactly spot on for me.


Summary:

To sum it all up in very simple words: This is a hell of a book !!

Its the most compact, well structured book on Nagios that I have seen to date. It contains many WOW-factors. While reading each chapter you can virtually "feel" how Davids explanations and tips and tricks already helped you to avoid time consuming pitfalls.

So this book is not about "to buy or not to buy", this is an investment you dont want to miss !!

I was especially impressed by the thoroughness the book is written by from the first page. Also the contents of the first chapter wasnt new to me, the way it was explained already provided many of those A-ha moments.

The main asset of the book is not the description of the tools itself, but rather the tought and considerations the author put into it and the sharing of those thoughts in a way that the reader can actually visualize how and why one solution is better over another, without actually having to go to the "luxury to experience the pitfalls" in a live disaster scenario.


PS: AFTER I finished reading the book I re-read the "Editorial Review" Amazon gave above and found it pretty well describing the actual book and what you should expect.

>> You can find more reviews on Nagios related books including a comparison by deploying my profile. <<

David Josephsen's book provides excellent advice on how to bootstrap nagios for
your network. In addition it's also an excellent discussion of the challenges
inherent in using software to monitor software. The first two chapters are all I
needed to get a working set of object templates written and host/service
definitions loaded. The chapter on writing plugins is also excellent. What
makes this book stand out for me is that I have worked with many other nagios
installations where the original designer didn't have a plan before bring the
system online. These installations all failed and were quickly ignored due to
all the false positives. Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios
teaches you how to get started properly so this will not happen to you. It
explains how to build an infrastructure, not just install nagios. Like any
infrastructure, it should change with time. The advice from this books gave me
the confidence that Nagios is not only able, but best suited to serve this
complicated task.

In conculsion, Nagios is now performing many of the more unplesant tasks I was
once responsible for...and I trust it to do so. Each alert is taken seriously,
each event handler performs it's function. I would not have reached this goal
without this book.

The author clearly likes the product on the products own merits. The books is not written by a hack who was filling a void. He writes clearly and methodically explaining in detail why, what, how and when of Nagios. The index is very good and has allowed me to effectively use it as a reference in learning Nagios. I like some humor in my technical books and David does not disappoint me when he explains how to "ssh into his power strip" to do a little environmental monitoring.

Nagios - in my opinion - is a killer-app with such flexibility as to be the "ultimate" monitoring tool. Learning it is a wise investment of anyone's time, and Josephesen's book is invaluable to understanding and exploiting all of Nagios's features... and yes, I am over the age of 13.