Monitoring a gCube infrastructure With Nagios

Overview

Nagios is a popular open source computer monitor, network monitoring and infrastructure monitoring software application. Nagios offers complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services and is considered the defacto industry standard in IT infrastructure monitoring.

Nagios components

Nagios is composed by 2 main components the Nagios Server and Nagios plugins

Nagios Server

A Nagios server is an application running tests distributed on the infrastructures, it offers a powerful web interface which can be used by administrator to visualize / configure tests executions.

The installation instruction for Ubuntu,Fedora and OpenSuse can be found at [1]

Nagios Plugins

Nagios plugins are applications that can be executed by the Nagios server or directly in the monitored host. in the case of plugins executed on monitored host the Nagios Server can exploit several ways in order to retrieve the monitoring test results, the most common are :

• [2] which allows remotely execute Nagios plugins on other Linux/Unix machines. This allows you to monitor remote machine metrics (disk usage, CPU load, etc.)

• [3] is a flexible data transport mechanism and processor for Nagios. It is designed with a simple and powerful architecture that allows for it to be easily extended and customized to fit individual users' needs. It uses standard ports protocols (HTTP(S) and XML)

• [4] allows to integrate passive alerts and checks from remote machines and applications with Nagios. Useful for processing security alerts, as well as deploying redundant and distributed Nagios setups.

At the moment the Nagios monitoring plugins in gCube are executed directly by the Nagios server, so none of the method described before is currectly exploited. The usage of an NRPE daemon on each node of the infrastructure is currently under investigation.

Nagios Configuration in gCube

The