BGP.guru

BGP.guru

Nerd blog.

21 Jan 2016

How I Use Nagios

I have been using Nagios extensively to monitor infrastructure that I am interested in for about 10 years now, and each time I build a net-new Nagios monitoring system I version the configuration. I am up to Generation 4 now which includes:

  • Approx 75 hosts at the moment
  • Approx 130 service checks
  • Service checks for:
    • Generic TCP services (Tor ORPorts for example)
    • Ping checks (v4 and v6)
    • HTTP/HTTPS service checks (include cert expiry)
    • Other TCP services like SMTP, SMTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, POP3, and POP3S
    • NRPE-based host checks like total processes and disk space
    • DNS service checks (are all masters serving all zones they are supposed to be)
    • XMPP server checks
  • Custom Alerts:
    • SMS alerts on certain hosts using nagios-twilio
    • Email alerts include the output of mtr --show-ips --report --report-wide --aslookup -4 <host>

OS and Packages

Previously I’ve always run the Debian-included packages for Nagios, however those packages are stuck at Nagios v3.x and v4 has some improvements that I’ve been wanting to use for a long time. Recently when moving my main Nagios system to DigitalOcean I chose to build Nagios from source instead of using the Debian packages.

Managing Configs

I have stored all of my Nagios configurations in git for several years now. Before they were stored in git I stored them in subversion which I was able to convert over to a git repo. This makes it really easy to replicate any changes (commits) over to other Nagios systems.

I manage the contents of /etc/nagios3 on Debian, which includes conf.d where all of my custom config is stored. Now that I’m using a custom-compiled version I instead manage /usr/local/nagios/etc in git.


Theodore Baschak - Theo is a network engineer with experience operating core internet technologies like HTTP, HTTPS and DNS. He has extensive experience running service provider networks with OSPF, MPLS, and BGP.