Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios
David Josephson
Prentice Hall, 2007
264 pp, $34.99
ISBN: 0-132-23693-1
Nagios is a very slick, open source tool to help monitor network environments. I love to read books like David Josephson's Building A Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios for many reasons: It's easy to understand, it's honest, and it makes me feel like I could go implement Nagios in my environment with a sensible plan beforehand. After all, you would hope that you get that from a book with such a title, but Josephson really makes it happen.
I also appreciate the author's humor and use of community feedback in the book. The fact that he is an active part of the Nagios community and quotes others who use the software and their experiences makes it seem more reliable and trustworthy. For example, in the installation chapter, he quotes an "adept technical reviewer" by the name of Kate Harris and her experience with installing Nagios on Solaris. This makes it evident that the author sought out (or researched) a wide base of feedback while working on the book. And, in the same chapter, we see a good example of his humor: Listing 3.1 is titled "Installing Nagios for the Impatient Person". Realistic labels and advice are sprinkled like this throughout the entire book. Josephson starts off with a very broad discussion of best practices for monitoring your environment, with an entire section of security (thumbs up!). Then he segues into a discussion on the theory of operations, entailing the many components that should be considered when trying to architect any type of monitoring infrastructure in IT. I found this to be a wonderful companion to the best practices chapter because so often the monitoring component is put into an environment, then grows organically without thought to these areas.
The next several chapters are dedicated to the basics of Nagios: installing and configuring, including a chapter that discusses the many less-painful ways to make installation configs much more consistent (see Chapter 5 "Bootstrapping the Configs"'). The real meat then of the book comes in the "Watching" chapter (6) where the author discusses the many various ways you could monitor for different items of interest, as well as in the "Visualization" chapter, which discusses your many options for reporting and analyzing the numerous amounts of data that you have to deal with.
The watching discussion even includes a section on how you might be able to monitor environmental sensors in your data center. This is a nice feature because I have had the unfortunate opportunity of running into some surprise mornings of walking into an inferno in the data center (air conditioning on the fritz) with no warning. Sometimes you might not think about monitoring this in an IT shop, but it can be very helpful! So, if you are in the situation where you really need to get something in place to monitor your environment, whether large or small or somewhere in between, look into Nagios as an option. Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios is a great way to investigate whether this will be an option and also provides some excellent background and groundwork for monitoring with any system in a network environment.
