Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

Introduction

This is a book about untrustworthy machines; machines, in fact, that are every bit as untrustworthy as they are critical to our well-being. But I don’t need to bore you with a laundry list of how prevalent computer systems have become or with horror stories about what can happen when they fail. If you picked up this book, then I’m sure you’re aware of the problems: layer upon layer of interdependent libraries hiding bugs in their abstraction, script kiddies, viruses, DDOS attacks, hardware failures, end-user errors, back-hoes, hurricanes, and on and on. It doesn’t matter whether the root cause is malicious or accidental, your systems will fail. When they do fail, only two things will save you from the downtime: redundancy and monitoring ...