Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software. It watches hosts and services that we specify, alerting us when things go bad and again when they get better.
Nagios was designed to run under Linux.
Nagios is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
Nagios Features
- Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH)
- Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) on a majority of network operating systems, even Microsoft Windows with the NRPE_NT plugins.
- Monitoring of anything else like probes (temperature, alarms...) which have the ability to send collected data via a network to specifically written plugins
- Remote monitoring supported through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels.
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using the tools of choice (Bash, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
- Parallelized service checks
- Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
- Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, SMS, or any user-defined method through plugin system)
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
- Automatic log file rotation
- Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
- Optional web interface for viewing current network status, notifications, problem history, log files, etc.
