| Who Should Read This Book?
This book is an introductory guide to Nagios 2.0. It presumes no prior knowledge of Nagios
and indeed focuses entirely (with minor digressions) on the current version of Nagios.Itis
designed for system administrators,operations managers,IT managers,and support staff
who need to deploy a tool to monitor and report on IT assets and applications.
The book starts from scratch and introduces how to install Nagios, build your basic
monitoring configuration, and use the Nagios web console. It then covers some advanced
topics such as escalations, dependencies, distributed monitoring, how to integrate Nagios
with other tools, and how to develop your own monitoring checks. At the end of this book,
youshould have the ability to deploy and monitor using Nagios, to implement redundancy
orfailover capabilities with Nagios, to integrate Nagios into other tools such as MRTG and
syslog-NG—and you should have an idea of where to look for additional knowledge and
resources that might answer more advanced questions and issues.
The book presumes some experience with Unix and Windows platforms, as you will need
to install and configure Nagios on a Unix-based host, and you will need to configure monitor-
ing for your remote hosts and devices. This assumed prior knowledge includes the following:
•Knowledge of TCP/IP networking
•Some knowledge of firewalls, including iptables
•Some exposure to the Apache web server
•Ability to install and run software on Unix and Windows hosts
•The ability to use editors and command-line tools on Unix and Windows hosts |
