Summary

Our Nagios setup is now complete and is ready to be started! We took the road from source code into a working application. We have also configured it so that it monitors the machine it is running on from scratch, and it took very little time and effort to do so.

Our Nagios installation now uses three directories—/opt/nagios for binaries, /etc/nagios for configuration, and /var/nagios for storing data. All object definitions are stored in a categorized way as the subdirectories /etc/nagios. This allows much easier management of Nagios objects.

We have configured the server that Nagios is running on, to be monitored. You might want to add more servers just to see how they works.

We told Nagios to monitor only the SSH server. But in all proability, you will also want to monitor other things such as a web server or email.

Chapter 4, Overview of Nagios Plugins, will help when it comes to setting up various types of checks. Make sure to read the /etc/nagios/commands/default.cfg file to see what commands Nagios already came configured with. Sometimes, it will also be needed to set up your own check commands—either custom scripts, or using Nagios plugins in a different way from the default command set.

You would also want to set up other users if you are working as part of a larger team. It will definitely help everyone in your team if you tell Nagios who is taking care of which parts of the infrastructure!

All that should be a good start for making sure everything works fine in your company. Of course, configuring Nagios for your needs might take a lot of time, but starting with monitoring just the essentials is a good thing. You will learn how it works and increase the number of monitorables over time.

The next step is to set up the web interface so that you will be able to see things from your favorite browser or even put on your desktop. The next chapter provides the essential information on how to install, configure, and use it.