About Nagios

Nagios
Nagios is a great success story of OpenSource software. A monitoring system build with a core set of features, a fast and responsive web interface and a simple API to create custom plugins in whatever language prefered is blowing away the commercial competition. Already established in small and medium IT organisations, it is also making its inroads to enterprise companies through the IT 'backdoor'. Engineers who need to get the job done fast and reliable could not wait for enterprise IT's slow response to cater their quickly changing and increasing needs for monitoring. This did not go unnoticed, and with commercial support available, even large companies move to Nagios as their main monitoring solution.

Past History

I noticed Nagios first in 2000, when it was still called NetSaint. We needed operational monitoring for our production firewalls, proxies and load balancers. There, NetSaint fullfilled its job nicely. In the old days, It was quite some work to install the software. After collecting all the necessary source code while making sure not to miss a dependency, almost every component required compilation from hand. This was the typical way of installing before Nagios became mainstream, before it was included into Linux distributions. In the past, commercial UNIX systems had been around more, I was running NetSaint v0.0.6 on a highly available SUN server under Solaris 8, which was also doubling as our central log collection system.

Today

I am running Nagios to monitor 1.500 systems with over 5.000 service checks across 3 datacenters, all from a single system. Nagios has proven itself many times over. In addition to performing the operational monitoring of 300 servers, 700 network devices and 500 printers, it is graphing performance and capacity information to provide longterm trends. Now our development teams are very keen on using this data to evaluate their application performance tests and with outsourcing becoming IT normality, I am providing automation for alerts and escalation to our service providers. The modular design of Nagios allows for rapid development of new plugins to address new devices and applications if needed, and a active community is a great resource to draw upon.

Professional Services

Frank4DD Services
Here I am documenting some of my work to allow the community to draw from my experience. A few years ago I started publishing articles on my homepage, and when both traffic increased and the content became too much, I finally decided it's time to give it a dedicated website.
In addition to publishing, I am providing professional consulting services on request. Please contact me for details under support[at]frank4dd[dot]com.

Best Regards,
Frank

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