What is Nagios?
Nagios is a network monitoring tool which helps you identify problems in your network and fix them helping you offer extensive support.
It is used to monitor both Windows and Linux/Unix based networks in addition to monitoring the web services, NNTP, POP, PING, processor load, disk usage, applications, switches, routers, firewalls, print services that run on it and the list extends.
Nagios can be used to monitor multitudes of database servers such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle and applications such as apache, postfix, LDAP, citrix.
On successful installation, you can access the interface by going to http://<>/nagios and by typing the username & password for the login.
Notifications/Alerts can be configured for a single user/multiple users with ease. Group of users can be created to create a hierarchy in message escalation which makes it the standard choice in the industry.
Strengths and uses of Nagios
* It is open source
* Large community support
* Continous development
* Runs on Windows, Linux, Unix flavors
* Availability of additional plug-in modules extending its functionalities
What should you do?
You can download Nagios from http://www.nagios.org/download
For an easy installation and step-by-step guide for a beginner follow the article on http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-fedora.html
