Nagios best practices?

[Steve Huff]

Hello folks!

I'd like to roll out Nagios to replace our aging Mon installation;  
however, setting up Nagios has been more difficult than I had  
expected, which makes me wonder if I'm going about it the wrong way.

Can you recommend a Nagios best practices document or howto?

Essentially, I'd like to do as little per-host configuration as  
possible; I'd like to be able to define service templates for each of  
the services I'll need to monitor, then arrange hosts into groups  
such that all the machines in each group have a certain service  
template assigned to them (e.g. all the web servers get a web_server  
template, which tells Nagios to monitor HTTP and HTTPS service; when  
we bring a new web server into production, I create a host entry for  
the new web server which says that it's part of the web_server group,  
and Nagios starts monitoring HTTP and HTTPS service on it).

I specifically want to avoid the situation where every time we bring  
a new machine online, I have to define all the services on it  
individually, then go through all the various host group and service  
group definitions and add entries to them one by one.

Is this a reasonable scheme, or should I be approaching this problem  
a different way?

thanks,
-Steve

P.S. I have tried a couple of web-based Nagios configurators (Fruity,  
NagiosQL); in each case I end up with invalid Nagios configurations,  
which again leads me to suspect that I'm trying to set up Nagios in a  
configuration for which it was not designed.

-- 
Steve Huff - Systems Administrator, Harvard-MIT Data Center -  
shuff at hmdc.harvard.edu




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