Install And Configure Nagios on

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

by SK

http://www.unixmen.com/install-configure-nagios-ubuntu-14-04-lts/
Nagios is an open source software that can be used for network and infrastructure
monitoring. Nagios will monitor servers, switches, applications and services. It alerts the
System Administrator when something goes wrong and also alerts back when the issues
has been rectified.
Using Nagios, you can:

Monitor your entire IT infrastructure.

Identify problems before they occur.

Know immediately when problems arise.

Share availability data with stakeholders.

Detect security breaches.

Plan and budget for IT upgrades.

Reduce downtime and business losses.

Scenario
In this tutorial i am going to use two systems as mentioned below.

Nagios server:
Operating system : Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server
IP Address

: 192.168.1.250/24

Nagios client:
Operating System : Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop
IP Address

: 192.168.1.100/24

Prerequisites

Make sure your server have installed with fully working LAMP stack. If not, follow the
below link to install LAMP server On Ubuntu 14.04 and earlier versions.

Install LAMP Server On Ubuntu 14.04

Install Nagios
Install nagios and nagios plugin using the following command:
sudo apt-get install nagios3 nagios-nrpe-plugin
During installation, youll have to answer some simple questions. First, youll be asked to
configure your mail server to get alerts from your nagios server.

Select the type of mail configuration:

Enter the system mail name. It will be automatically selected by the installer. If not,
enter it manually.

Enter the nagiosadmin password.

Re-enter the nagiosadmin password.

Configure Nagios
After

nagios

and

data directory

to

nagios

plugins

nagios

installation,

user,

and

assign
set

the

permissions

executable

of www-

permission

to

the /var/lib/nagios3/ directory.

sudo usermod -a -G nagios www-data
sudo chmod -R +x /var/lib/nagios3/
By default, Nagios wont check for external commands, just to be on the cautious side.
If you want to be able to use the CGI command interface, you will have to enable this.
To do that, edit file /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg,
sudo nano /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg
Find the line,
check_external_commands=0
And change it to:
check_external_commands=1

Save and close the file. Restart nagios service.

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart

Access Nagios Web console

Open up the web browser and point it to http://ip-address/nagios3. Youll be asked
to enter the username and password. Enter username as nagiosadmin and the password
that youve created earlier.

This is how my Nagios web console looked.

Click on the Hosts section on the left pane to list of hosts being monitored.

If you want to see the complete details of a monitoring hosts, click on the respective
monitoring hosts in the above window.

As you see in the above picture, the localhost(Nagios server) itself only is being
monitored by default. We have to add the clients to monitor them now.

Add Monitoring targets

Now let us add some clients to monitor by Nagios server. To do that we have to
install nrpe and nagios-pluginspackages in our monitoring targets.
sudo apt-get install nagios-nrpe-server nagios-plugins

Configure Monitoring targets

Edit /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg file,
sudo nano /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg
Add your Nagios server ip address:
[...]
allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1 192.168.1.100
[...]
Start/Restart nrpe service as shown below.
sudo /etc/init.d/nagios-nrpe-server restart
Now, go back to your Nagios server to add the clients to be monitored through nagios
server.

By

default,

Debian

based

systems

uses

configuration

directory

called /etc/nagios3/conf.d/ where nagios3-common, other packages and the local

admin can dump or link all object configuration files into.
In the object configuration files, you can define hosts, host groups, contacts, contact
groups, services, etc. You can split your object definitions across several config files if
you wish, or keep them all in a single config file.
Ex:
cfg_file=/etc/nagios3/objects/commands.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios3/objects/contacts.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios3/objects/timeperiods.cfg
cfg_file=/etc/nagios3/objects/templates.cfg
Also, You can tell Nagios to process all config files (with a .cfg extension) in a particular
directory by using thecfg_dir directive.
In this tutorial, I will tell Nagios to process client config files in a particular directory.
Edit /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg file,
sudo nano /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg

and uncomment the following line.

[...]
cfg_dir=/etc/nagios3/servers
Create a directory called servers under /etc/nagios3/ location.
sudo mkdir /etc/nagios3/servers
Create config file to the client to be monitored. In my case, I want to monitor my Ubuntu
desktop which has IP address 192.168.1.100, and hostname as sk.
sudo nano /etc/nagios3/servers/clients.cfg
Add the following lines:
define host{

use

generic-host

host_name

alias

sk

sk

address

192.168.1.100

max_check_attempts

check_period

24x7

notification_interval

30

notification_period

24x7

}
Save and close the file.

Here, sk is my Ubuntu 14.04 client host name, and 192.168.1.100 is the IP address of
my client.
Restart nagios service.
sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart
Now, open the nagios web console again in the browser and navigate to Hosts section
in the left pane. You should see the newly added client will be visible there. Click on the
host to see if there is anything wrong or alerts. Please note that you have to wait 90
seconds after any changes in your nagios server.

Click on the monitoring target, youll get the detailed output:

Like

this

way,

you

can

define

more

clients

files /etc/nagios3/servers directory for each client.

Define services

by

creating

separate

config

We have defined the monitoring host before. Now let us add some services of the
monitoring host. For example, to monitor the ssh service, add the following lines shown
in red colour in the /etc/nagios3/servers/clients.cfg file.
sudo nano /etc/nagios3/servers/clients.cfg
Add the lines shown in red color:
define host{

use

generic-host

host_name

alias

sk

sk

address

192.168.1.100

max_check_attempts

check_period

24x7

notification_interval

30

notification_period

24x7

}
define service {
use
host_name
service_description
check_command
notifications_enabled
}

generic-service
sk
SSH
check_ssh
0

Save and close the file. Restart Nagios.

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart
Now log in to Nagios web console and check for the added services. Navigate
to Services section, you should see thessh service will be available there.

To know more about object definitions such as Host definitions, service definitions,
contact definitions and more please do visit here. This page will describe you the
description and format of all nagios object definitions.
Thats it. Happy Monitoring with Nagios!
Reference Links:

Nagios Homepage

For questions please refer to our Q/A forum at : http://ask.unixmen.com/