Neighborly Nagios

Half Day Afternoon
(1:30 pm-5:00 pm)

Thurgood Marshall East

LISA15: Metrics
S6
David Josephsen, Librato
Description: 

Neighborly Nagios is a beginner-level tutorial on the venerable monitoring system. Rather than teaching Nagios in a vacuum, this tutorial emphasizes the important role played by centralized, polling-based monitoring systems like Nagios in the context of a modern engineering organization. We will focus on the hooks and I/O intricacies systems engineers need to rely on in order to make Nagios play nicely with other commonly used monitoring tools.

Who should attend: 

Sysadmins interested in learning about Nagios.

Take back to work: 

Attendees will leave with a solid conceptual understanding of Nagios, as well as centralized, polling-based monitoring systems in general. They will have configured Nagios to run local and remote service, and host checks, as well as perform email and webhook notifications. Attendees will also configure Nagios to work with several visualization systems, and to emit logs into a centralized event-logging infrastructure.

Topics include: 

Why learn Nagios?

  • Centralized pollers in theory and practice

Reality through the eyes of Nagios

  • Hosts, services, and plugins
  • Server-side vs. client-side plugins and remote execution
  • Active polling vs. passive checks
  • People (contacts, contact groups, and notification commands)

Installing and configuration

  • Nagios configuration layout and templating
  • Macros and commands
  • Templates for hosts, services, and contacts
  • A simple template setup using hostgroups
  • A flexible template setup
  • Managing your configs

Data-In: Plugins and data collection frameworks

  • Three simple, server-side plugins
  • NRPE
  • NRDP
  • Check_MK

Data-Out: Hooks and data export strategies

  • Performance Data and Time Series
  • Nagios Event Radio Dispatch (NERD)
  • PNP4Nagios and RRDTool
  • Graphios and Graphite
  • MK LiveStatus

Neighborly Nagios: One part of an effective monitoring infrastructure

  • Data as a first-class citizen
  • Composable telemetry processing infrastructure
  • Intro to Statsd
  • Intro to Heka
  • Intro to Reimann
Additional Materials: 

Attendees are encouraged to have a laptop with Vagrant installed.

Presentation Type: 
Training