4 must have monitoring for monitoring Linux

[crosscourt]

Look here, www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2018 ... ring-linux

[tlmiller]

I had set up nagios at work when we were considering using that to do the monitoring for our environment. They're not kidding that there's a lot of work involved, but it really is nice once it's set up, and for monitoring linux systems is pretty amazing, whether local or remote. It's monitoring for remote Windows systems left something to be desired IMO, which is why we didn't go with it.

[crosscourt]

Never used Nagios but was aware of it and others have told me their experience with it, looks great.

[tlmiller]

for monitoring a linux system, there's not many things it CAN'T monitor...

For (most of the monitors on) Windows it requires you run an actual application on the monitored system, and there's only so much it can monitor.

But if you want to monitor multiple linux machines, it's AMAZING how much information this can give you.

[crosscourt]

System monitor Ive never cared for as i tend to get wrong numbers that i cant back up with other tools. Memory resources tend to be high versus Htop and i realize they see things a bit differently but the difference is huge.

[tlmiller]

This is nice because you can run a nagios server and have it monitoring the ping times, certificate health, and number of apache daemons on the web servers, network bandwidth on the servers acting as firewalls, memory usage and drive IO performance on the DB servers, etc. So if you're doing a single system, yeah, it might not be that efficient compared to the built in tools that do the same job. But if you've got a full environment and you want to be able to see the health of everything from a single location, this is nice. You can set up a single webpage with Nagios with a dashboard that shows you the health of your entire ecosystem with a glance.

[crosscourt]

That sounds like an amazing feature set.

[tlmiller]

Yeah, and basically get all the information through ssh plugins, so can be done securely with private/public keypairs, no insecure http traffic!!

Well, obviously pings and a few are done with icmp or http, but you know what i mean...

[crosscourt]

That i really like.

[tlmiller]

Yeah, it's great software. Nagios does offer Enterprise version (precompiled with all the available plugins), but the free, open source version has all the abilities you just need to compile all the plugins yourself. Good thing is if you use the same version on all your machines, you can compile it one time and install it everywhere.