Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

Chapter 1. Best Practices

Building a monitoring infrastructure is a complex undertaking. The system can potentially interact with every system in the environment, and its users range from the layman to the highly technical. Building the monitoring infrastructure well requires not only considerable systems know-how, but also a global perspective and good people skills.

Most importantly, building monitoring systems also requires a light touch. The most important distinction between good monitoring systems and bad ones is the amount of impact they have on the network environment, in areas such as resource utilization, bandwidth utilization, and security. This first chapter contains a collection of advice gleaned from mailing lists such as [e-mail] ...