Overview This KB article shows you how to download a file directly from the Nagios Exchange to your Linux server using the WGET command. This can be handy when you require an additional plugin on your Nagios server or an NRPE client.   Download... Read More

Adaptive Monitoring This documentation explains how Nagios allows you to change certain commands and host and service check attributes during runtime. Documentation - Adaptive Monitoring   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please... Read More

Alerting With MySQL and Nagios - NWC13 Sheeri Cabral's presentation - "Alerting On MySQL With Nagios" during the Nagios World Conference North America 2012.       Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios... Read More

Cached Checks This documentation explains how cached checks allow Nagios to forgo executing a host or service check command if it determines a relatively recent check result will do instead. Documentation - Cached Checks   Final Thoughts For any... Read More

Custom CGI Headers and Footers This documentation explains how to have a custom header and/or footer displayed in the output of the CGIs. Documentation - Custom CGI Headers and Footers   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit... Read More

Detection and Handling of State Flapping Nagios supports optional detection of hosts and services that are "flapping". Flapping occurs when a service or host changes state too frequently, resulting in a storm of problem and recovery notifications.... Read More

Distributed Monitoring This documentation explains different solutions that allow Nagios to scale to monitor a large infrastructure. Documentation - Distributed Monitoring   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios... Read More

Enhanced CGI Security and Authentication This documentation is an introduction for implementation of stronger authentication and server security focused around the CGI web interface. Documentation - Enhanced CGI Security and Authentication   Final... Read More

Event Handlers This documentation explains what event handlers are in Nagios Core. Documentation - Event Handlers   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at: http://support.nagios.com/forum/ Read More

External Commands This documentation explains how external applications can submit commands by writing to the command file, which is periodically processed by the Nagios daemon. Documentation - External Commands   Final Thoughts For any support... Read More

Fast Startup Options There are a few things you can do that can decrease the amount of time it take Nagios to startup (or restart). These speedups involve easing some of the burden involved in processing your configuration files.Starting with Nagios... Read More

graphing Performance Info With MRTG This documentation shows how the nagiostats utility allows you to graph various Nagios performance statistics over time using MRTG. Documentation - graphing Performance Info With MRTG   Final Thoughts For any... Read More

Host and Service Dependencies Service and host dependencies are an advanced feature of Nagios that allow you to control the behavior of hosts and services based on the status of one or more other hosts or services. This documentation will explain how... Read More

How to Maintain Over 20 Monitoring Appliances - NWC14 This presentation will give the answer to issues we've faced in managing multiple Nagios server deployments. We have about 25 engineers using the Nagios servers located at our customers... Read More

How to Think with Nagios to Solve Monitoring Problems - NWC14 Welcome to the wonderful journey of monitoring problem solving! The different aspects of the essence of monitoring will be presented to you. You can learn the trick to make a plugin pass... Read More

Integration Overview This documentation shows there are several methods of integrating Nagios with the management software you're already using and you can monitor almost any type of new or custom hardware, service, or application that you might... Read More

Large Installation Tweaks Users with large Nagios installations may benefit from the use_large_installation_tweaks configuration option. This documentation explains how enabling this option allows the Nagios daemon to take certain shortcuts which... Read More

Leveraging SNMP Extensions with Nagios - NWC13 The MIB for SNMP extension is NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB which can be used as an agent-less option for monitoring. This MIB will provide the option to query commands or shell scripts for metrics that are... Read More

Monitoring Remote Locations with Nagios - NWC13 Monitoring a single, connected network is straightforward. When you need to monitor various locations, with different access and connectivity challenges, things get a little more complicated. This... Read More

Monitoring Service and Host Clusters This documentation will show you how you can perform cluster monitoring based on the state of other hosts and services. Documentation - Monitoring Service and Host Clusters   Final Thoughts For any support... Read More

Multi-Tenant Nagios Monitoring - NWC14 This presentation details an implementation of Nagios Core that is used to monitor more than 5 individual customers using remote appliances sending via secure links to a central location.       Final... Read More

Nagios as a PC Health Monitor - NWC14 For organisations with limited budget or resources, Nagios can be a great tool to monitor the health of the their PC fleet. This presentation will cover real world examples of how integrating Nagios, NSClient++... Read More

Nagios on AWS - Live Install and More! - NWC14 In this session, we will start with a brand new Amazon Web Service EC2 virtual instance install of Nagios Core, do some basic configuration and security hardening, install check_mk, and then have it... Read More

Nagios Plugin API This documentation provides information about developing plugins. Documentation - Nagios Plugin API   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at: http://support.nagios.com/forum/ Read More

Nagios, AWS, and Hosted VoIP - NWC13 Nagios, AWS, and Hosted VoIP Or, "How to automatically scale your platform to match your demand". SmartVox™ provides hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) services to small business and non-profit customers in the US... Read More

Notification Escalations Nagios supports optional escalation of contact notifications for hosts and services. This documentation explains how escalations work. Documentation - Notification Escalations   Final Thoughts For any support related... Read More

Object Inheritance This documentation explains how object inheritance works in Nagios which can be used in object definitions and templates. Documentation - Object Inheritance   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the... Read More

On-Call Rotations This documentation will show you how you can create timeperiod definitions in a way that can facilitate most on-call notification rotations. Documentation - On-Call Rotations   Final Thoughts For any support related questions... Read More

Passive Host State Translation This documentation explains passive host state translation in distributed and failover monitoring installations of Nagios. Documentation - Passive Host State Translation   Final Thoughts For any support related... Read More

Passive Monitoring with Nagios - NWC14 Whereas active monitoring receives all the attention, passive monitoring is the be-all, end-all to truly managing by exception. This session will present three scenarios for passive monitoring including:... Read More

Performance Data Nagios is designed to allow plugins to return optional performance data in addition to normal status data, as well as allow you to pass that performance data to external applications for processing. A description of the different... Read More

Predictive Dependency Checks This documentation explains how predictive dependency checks for hosts and services works in Nagios. Documentation - Predictive Dependency Checks   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios... Read More

Scheduled Downtime This documentation explains how Nagios allows you to schedule periods of planned downtime for hosts and service that you're monitoring. This is useful in the event that you actually know you're going to be taking a server... Read More

Security Considerations This documentation is a brief overview of things you should keep in mind when installing Nagios, so as set it up in a secure manner. Documentation - Security Considerations   Final Thoughts For any support related questions... Read More

Service and Host Freshness Checks Nagios supports a feature that does "freshness" checking on the results of host and service checks. This documentation explains how freshness checks work. Documentation - Service and Host Freshness Checks   Final... Read More

SNMP Explained - NWC15 How does the snmp protocol work and how can it be used within Nagios?       Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at: http://support.nagios.com/forum/ Read More

SNMP Monitoring Architecture With Nagios - NWC13 SNMP is sometimes feared for being not-so-simple monitoring protocol, but as a standard it has proven its worth many times and is the main way to monitor network equipment as well as supported by all... Read More

SNMP Trap Integration There are hundreds of community-contributed SNMP addons and projects on Nagios Exchange. This documentation provides a few links to SNMP projects and categories that are most useful when integrating SNMP traps with Nagios.... Read More

Standard Macros in Nagios Standard macros that are available in Nagios are listed in this documentation. Documentation - Standard Macros in Nagios   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at: http:/... Read More

State Stalking State "stalking" is a feature which allows you to log changes in the output service and host checks even if the state of the host or service does not change. This documentation will explain how state stalking works. Documentation -... Read More

TCP Wrapper Integration This document explains how to easily generate alerts in Nagios for connection attempts that are rejected by TCP wrappers. For example, if an unauthorized host attempts to connect to your SSH server, you can receive an alert in... Read More

The Art & Zen of Managing Nagios with Puppet - NWC14 The trend towards DevOps has brought new levels of agility and responsiveness to all sorts of IT organizations, from small startups to large enterprises. But with the constant production... Read More

Time-Saving Tricks For Object Definitions This documentation explains how you can exploit the features of template-based object definitions to save yourself time and to create complex (and simple) monitoring configurations. Documentation - Time... Read More

Tuning Nagios For Maximum Performance Tuning Nagios to increase performance can be necessary when you start monitoring a large number (> 1,000) of hosts and services. This documentation explains things to look at for optimizing Nagios.... Read More

Understanding Macros and How They Work One of the main features that make Nagios so flexible is the ability to use macros in command defintions. Macros allow you to reference information from hosts, services, and other sources in your commands.... Read More

Overview This KB article explains the purpose of the retention.dat file and how to modify it when required. This is an advanced topic and care should be taken.   State Retention File This is the file that Nagios will use for storing status,... Read More

Using The Nagiostats Utility A utility called nagiostats is included in the Nagios distribution. It is compiled and installed along with the main Nagios daemon. This documentation explains how the nagiostats utility allows you to obtain various... Read More

Volatile Services This documentation explains what volatile services are in Nagios Core. Documentation - Volatile Services   Final Thoughts For any support related questions please visit the Nagios Support Forums at: http://support.nagios.com/forum/ Read More

Group Deployment of Service Checks - NWC15 This presentation will show how you can create groups of checks like CPU metrics, Oracle metrics or IIS metrics and push them to all of the hosts that require them.  The presentation will provide a script... Read More

Integrating On-Call Schedules with Nagios - NWC13 This presentation will demonstrate how the team at the large retail company integrated the data from our on-call information with Nagios. This integration affects who is alerted for host and service... Read More

Overview When configuring my monitoring agent I need to define the password in a plain text file. This seems very insecure, how do I encrypt it? — Concerned Customer This is a valid question, this KB article discusses the limitations around... Read More

Overview Nagios XI, as well as the Linux command line interface, have some reserved characters that need to be escaped in specific ways. Special characters are a group of characters that carry out special instructions, like the dollar sign $ which... Read More