Linux Networking Cookbook

13.3. Organizing Nagios' Configuration Files Sanely

Problem

You're looking at the sample configuration files in /usr/local/nagios/etc and studying the documentation, and you realize that you're going to be managing a whole lot of interdependent files. How are you going to keep track of everything?

Solution

A simple hack to keep your sanity is to use a single directory to store all configuration files—with three exceptions, which we'll get to in a moment—and then use the cfg_dir option in nagios.cfg instead of the cfg_file option to include them. cfg_dir means "use all the files in this directory," so you can easily control which files Nagios uses by simply adding or removing them. This is easier than keeping track of a herd of individual cfg_file options.

This is what the default /usr/local/nagios/etc directory looks like after following the previous recipes:

	$ cd /usr/local/nagios/
	$ tree etc
	etc
	|-- cgi.cfg-sample
	|-- commands.cfg-sample
	|-- htpasswd.users
	|-- localhost.cfg-sample
	|-- nagios.cfg-sample
	`-- resource.cfg-sample
	
	|-- bigger.cfg-sample
	|-- cgi.cfg-sample
	|-- commands.cfg-sample
	|-- minimal.cfg-sample
	|-- misccommands.cfg-sample
	|-- nagios.cfg-sample
	`-- resource.cfg-sample

I like to organize them like this:

	$ tree --dirsfirst etc etc |-- lan_objects | |-- commands.cfg | |-- contacts.cfg | |-- hosts.cfg | |-- commands.cfg | |-- services.cfg | `-- timeperiods.cfg |-- sample |-- |cgi.cfg-sample | |-- commands.cfg-sample | |-- localhost.cfg-sample | |-- nagios.cfg-sample | ...