Long story short, I changed jobs about 6 months ago and found myself in a new position without any appreciable monitoring of the hardware for which I’m responsible. That needed to change as soon as I started to have time to put some hours into it. I did a little testing and poking around with some other monitoring tools but kept coming back to Nagios as the right choice, despite the mountain of work involved in setting it up. There is such a large community of help and plugins available for it, plus it’s a tool I’ve used at other jobs for many years.
The actual process of standing up a Nagios server is incredibly simple, but that initial server does almost nothing. Let’s go over these initial steps today and I’ll post little updates of the settings and configs I’ve rolled into Nagios over time to monitor different hardware and software platforms.
Step 1 for me was to install a minimal Centos 7 install. I’m a long time user of Centos and this is a default starting point for so many of my projects. After that initial install I usually install a few tools I like to have around and lower some of the security on the system to prevent myself getting stuck solving an issue that isn’t within the application.
For me, I run this command on basically all of my Centos 7 installs:
yum update -y && yum install epel-release -y && yum install htop wget mlocate -y && updatedb && systemctl disable firewalld && vi /etc/selinux/config && reboot
This command does the following:
1.) Updates all packages on the system
2.) Install the EPEL repository, for additional packages I like to have
3.) Installs several packages I like to have, some of which are in the EPEL repo, hence why it’s third in the list.
4.) updatedb is the command that builds a database of files on the system for easy/fast searching. Once the package mlocate is installed you can run it, and then use the ‘locate’ command to find files.
5.) This disables the firewall, which I leave off for the initial config of the machine. Once the machine is working, I switch it back on and open only the ports required. This, for me, is faster then guessing back and forth when something it’s working.. is it the software? Firewall? I’m never sure. I would only do this on a machine not on the public internet.
6.) This command launches vi so I can edit the selinux level on the system. I change it to permissive while I setup the server and then make the necessary change to selinux policy once the system has stabilized. I then move this back to ‘enforcing’. This isn’t a step to take lightly and is very important.
7.) Once you save and quit vi the system will process the final command and reboot the machine.
When the system returns to service you’re ready to start installing and setting up Nagios. With EPEL already setup, it’s just a couple quick commands.
Firstly, you need to install the required packages. This can be done with one command:
yum install nagios nagios-plugins-all
Once done, you need to enable and start the two required servies, httpd (Apache) and nagios.
systemctl enable nagios httpd
systemctl start nagios httpd
Once done, it’s best to setup a password for the default nagiosadmin user, and setup any other users you might want. To setup the nagiosadmin user:
htpasswd /etc/nagios/passwd nagiosadmin
To create a new user:
htpasswd /etc/nagios/passwd (**User Name**)
With this complete you're all set. Nagios is online and working. You can access it on your server at:
http://(**server IP Address**)/nagios
You'll see a couple standard checks running on 'localhost', one of which is in an error state due to how Centos configures httpd. Nothing to be concerned about.. I actually delete that check. Next time, we'll talk more about making Nagios do something useful, like monitoring something beyond itself.
Incredibly useful – thanks.