pro nagios 20
One of my responsibilities at work is to do one week of 24-hour on-call each month. During the weekdays, there's rarely an incident. However, Saturday nights are known for one or two alerts. In a nutshell, here's how last Saturday went:
Sometime around 4:30 or 5:00 AM, the cell phone starts beeping. I wake up and take a few minutes to figure out who I am, where I'm at, and what that noise is. Once that's established, I get out of bed to check to check the phone, only to stumble and trip into the dresser. Then I realize I probably drank too much the night before and should have had another two glasses of water before I went to bed. The text message on the cell phone is just reporting some off-hours maintenance going on. Annoyed, I throw the cell phone across the room and start towards the bathroom. I trip on the dog and stub my toe on the bathroom door. I'll skip the part about the mess in the bathroom. Getting back to bed, there are only two words on my mind. Toned down, they are
Stupid Nagios.
Nagios is an Open Source monitoring tool. You can use it to check on the health status of numerous services, both remote and local. Anything from checking to see if Apache is up and running to how much disk space is free on your file server. And when Apache crashes or your disks fill up, Nagios will send you a notice (usually on a Saturday night) and tell you about it.
Pro Nagios 2.0 is a complete guide to using Nagios in your network. Setting up a monitoring system can be a large and daunting task, but this book will show you how to do it in a totally readable and comprehendible way. The book starts out with the usual installation and configuration and ends with showing you how to write your own monitoring plugins. Everything else -- such as configuring what needs to be monitored, setting up notifications, integrating Syslog and Snort, distributing Nagios across several servers, and more -- is covered in between.
Though I've been exposed to Nagios for a few years, I've never actually taken the time to learn how to use it (that's mostly spite from being woke up in the middle of the night, though). However, after reading this book, I now have a clear understanding of how Nagios works, how to implement it across all types of networked equipment (like *nix servers, Windows servers, and routers and switches), and even how to shut it off during my week of on-call. I give this book a 10/10.
