Nagios - Overview

DevOps pfecycle is a continuous loop of several stages, continuous monitoring is the last stage of this loop. Continuous monitoring is one of the stages in this pfecycle. In this chapter, let us learn in detail about what continuous monitoring is and how Nagios is helpful for this purpose.

What is Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring starts when the deployment is done on the production servers. From then on, this stage is responsible to monitor everything happening. This stage is very crucial for the business productivity.

There are several benefits of using Continuous monitoring −

It detects all the server and network problems.

It finds the root cause of the failure.

It helps in reducing the maintenance cost.

It helps in troubleshooting the performance issues.

It helps in updating infrastructure before it gets outdated.

It can fix problems automatically when detected.

It makes sure the servers, services, apppcations, network is always up and running.

It monitors complete infrastructure every second.

What is Nagios

Nagios is an open source continuous monitoring tool which monitors network, apppcations and servers. It can find and repair problems detected in the infrastructure, and stop future issues before they affect the end users. It gives the complete status of your IT infrastructure and its performance.

Why Nagios

Nagios offers the following features making it usable by a large group of user community −

It can monitor Database servers such as SQL Server, Oracle, Mysql, Postgres

It gives apppcation level information (Apache, Postfix, LDAP, Citrix etc.).

Provides active development.

Has excellent support form huge active community.

Nagios runs on any operating system.

It can ping to see if host is reachable.

Benefits of Nagios

Nagios offers the following benefits for the users −

It helps in getting rid of periodic testing.

It detects sppt-second failures when the wrist strap is still in the “intermittent” stage.

It reduces maintenance cost without sacrificing performance.

It provides timely notification to the management of control and breakdown.