Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring: Including Plug-Ins and Hardware Devices [Paperback]

Max Schubert (Author), Derrick Bennett (Author), Jonathan Gines (Author), Andrew Hay (Author), John Strand (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1597492671 | ISBN-13: 978-1597492676 | Publication Date: June 2, 2008 | Edition: 1st

The future for Nagios in the enterprise is certainly bright! Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring can help you harness the full power of Nagios in your organization. Nagios 3 contains many significant new features and updates, and this book details them all for you. Once up and running, you'll see how a number of useful add-ons and enhancements for Nagios can extend the functionality of Nagios throughout your organization. And, if you want to learn how to write your own plugins...this is the book for you! In these pages you'll find a cookbook-style chapter full of useful plugins that monitor a variety of devices, from HTTP-based applications to CPU utilization to LDAP servers and more.

* Complete Case Study Demonstrates how to Deploy Nagios Globally in an Enterprise Network
* Monitor Third Party Hardware Devices with Nagios

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Max Schubert is an open source advocate, integrator, developer, and IT professional. He enjoys learning programming languages, designing and developing software, and working on any project that involves networks or networking.

Derrick Bennett has been working professionally in the IT Field for over 15 years in a full spectrum of Network and Software environments. He has been working with Nagios since initial releases in 2002. He has also contributed code to both NRPE and Nagios codebase for new features and fixes. His work with Nagios involves small corporate installations to large Fortune 500 deployments and custom configurations.

Jonathan Gines is a systems integrator, software engineer, and has worked for major corporations providing telecommunications and Internet services, healthcare management, accounting software development, and federal government contracting. His experience includes serving as an adjunct professor for Virginia Tech, teaching database design and development, developing modeling and simulation models in C++, and software development using open source programming technologies. Jonathan has a graduate degree from Virginia Tech, and holds several certifications including the CISSP and the ITIL Foundation credential.

Andrew leads a team of software developers at Q1 Labs Inc. integrating 3rd party event and vulnerability data into QRadar, their flagship network security management solution. Prior to joining Q1 Labs, Andrew was CEO and co-founder of Koteas Corporation, a leading provider of end to end security and privacy solutions for government and enterprise. His resume also includes such organizations as Nokia Enterprise Solutions, Nortel Networks, and Magma Communications, a division of Primus. Andrew is a strong advocate of security training, certification programs, and public awareness initiatives. He also holds several industry certifications including the CCNA, CCSA, CCSE, CCSE NGX, CCSE Plus, Security+, GCIA, GCIH, SSP-MPA, SSP-CNSA, NSA, RHCT, and RHCE.

John Strand currently teaches the SANS GCIH and CISSP classes. He is currently certified GIAC Gold in the GCIH and GCFW and is a Certified SANS Instructor. He is also a holder of the CISSP certification. He currently does consulting with his company Black Hills Information Security. He has a Masters degree from Denver University, and is currently also a professor at Denver University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Syngress; 1st edition (June 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597492671
• ISBN-13: 978-1597492676
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,130,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Let down by sprawl and electronic backup, October 17, 2008

By 

Richard James "rich-amazon" (Bristol, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring: Including Plug-Ins and Hardware Devices (Paperback)

This book suffers hugely from a large amount of code in the book. At a rough guess, I'd say between 1/3 and 1/4 of the book is code. This is simply unacceptable, as it should be a reference to the online code samples for reference, or come with a CD containing the info. Hard copy is not the place for pages of static code.

The cover promises downloads of a VMWare image, and scripts etc. Attempting to access this, as of the time of this review, the site simply says there's no such page. So I can't register the book with the publishing company, and thus can't access the code, the image or anything else online.

The core is useful info, but it could easily be in a book half its size, without the code cruft. This 'bulking out' makes it far less valuable to me as a 'keep with me reference', so it gets marked solidly as a 2 star. Certainly leaves me feeling that the $50 price tag was just not worth it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for advanced Nagios sysadmins, October 13, 2008

By 

Jimmy the Geek (Grand Rapids, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring: Including Plug-Ins and Hardware Devices (Paperback)

This is a great book if you are an established Nagios admin. If you are getting started with Nagios, I recommend "Pro Nagios 2.0" by Turnbull.

This book doesn't explain basic configuration (e.g. "Here's what the 'check_interval' parameter does...") Instead, it goes into more advanced issues like ways to handle SNMP traps, Windows monitoring and scalability.

This is the first book that deals specifically with Nagios v3 and its new features, so I would recommend it on that item alone. Many important changes were made since v2 and I'm glad its getting documented.

As always, there could be deeper treatment of many of the technical subjects. That, and the occasional amateurish writing or editing are what keep it from getting five stars.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enterprise Grade Nagios Reference, November 11, 2008

By 

Austin W. Matthews "ol skool computer nerd" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring: Including Plug-Ins and Hardware Devices (Paperback)

This book is just what I've been looking for to better understand Nagios v.3.0+ from an Enterprise perspective and it does an excellent job of explaining the new techniques.

This book is full of examples for every sized organization with lots of good ideas and general practices to follow. I found chapters 5 & 6 especially helpful in covering topics that can't be found anywhere else (let's face it, not too many other Nagios books out there to choose from).

This is an advanced enterprise geared book, so if you're looking for the basics like "retry_check_interval is blah" or "what does SNMP stand for?", then look no further than the Nagios website, it's all thoroughly documented there.

Finally, there is a electronic copy of this book included and even the Linux users out there should be able to access it via a Windows VM guest with a minimal amount of effort.

I have used Nagios 24x7x365 for a few years now, so I keep a copy of this book on my desk for reference, tips, techniques and guidance for the future.