Centos 6/RHEL install Nagios

Nagios is a powerful monitoring system that enables you to identify and resolve infrastructure problems before they affect critical processes.

Designed with scalability and flexibility in mind, Nagios gives you the peace of mind that comes from knowing your business processes won't be affected by unknown outages.

Nagios is a powerful tool that provides you with instant awareness of your organization's mission-critical IT infrastructure. It allows you to detect and repair problems and mitigate future issues before they affect end-users and customers.

By using Nagios, you can:

Plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems cause failures
Respond to issues at the first sign of a problem
Automatically fix problems when they are detected
Coordinate technical team responses
Ensure your organization's SLAs are being met
Ensure IT infrastructure outages have a minimal effect on your organization's bottom line
Monitor your entire infrastructure and business processes

To use Nagios, first make the necessary alterations to your network configuration file.

# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Change

ONBOOT=no to ONBOOT=yes

Add the following to the configuration file, fill the X’s to your IP configuration:

IPADDR=X.X.X.X
GATEWAY=X.X.X.X
NETMASK=X.X.X.X
NETWORK=X.X.X.X

Save and close the file, then restart the network service.

# service network restart

Now install the nagios related packages

# yum install httpd php gcc glibc glibc-common gd gd-devel openssl-devel wget perl make

Create the nagios user and set the password

# /usr/sbin/useradd -m nagios

# passwd nagios

Create the nagios group, nagcmd, which will allow external commands to be submitted through the web interface.

Then add the nagios user and apache user to the group

 
# /usr/sbin/groupadd nagcmd

# /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G nagcmd nagios

# /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G nagcmd apache

Create a temp directory to place the nagios downloads

# mkdir ~/downloads cd ~/downloads

Download nagios

# wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nagios-3.5.0.tar.gz

Extract the nagios tar ball

# cd nagios

Run the nagios script passing the nagcmd group

# ./configure --with-command-group=nagcmd

General Options: ------------------------- Nagios executable: nagios Nagios user/group: nagios,nagios Command user/group: nagios,nagcmd Embedded Perl: no Event Broker: yes Install ${prefix}: /usr/local/nagios Lock file: ${prefix}/var/nagios.lock Check result directory: ${prefix}/var/spool/checkresults Init directory: /etc/rc.d/init.d Apache conf.d directory: /etc/httpd/conf.d Mail program: /bin/mail Host OS: linux-gnu Web Interface Options: ------------------------ HTML URL: http://localhost/nagios/ CGI URL: http://localhost/nagios/cgi-bin/

Compile the nagios source code

# make all

Install the binaries, init script, sample configs, and set permissions on external command directory

# make install

# make install-init

# make install-config

# make install-commandmode

The sample config files have been installed in the /usr/local/nagios/etc directory.

Edit the /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg file and change the email address associated with the nagiosadmin contact definition to the address you’d like to use for receiving alerts.

# vi /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg

Configure the web interface

# make install-webconf

Create the nagiosadmin account for logging into the web interface

# htpasswd -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin

Restart Httpd

# service httpd restart

Download the plugins

# tar xzf nagios-plugin (tab)

# cd nagios-plugins (tab)

Compile and install the plugins

# ./configure --with-nagios-user=nagios –with-nagios-group=nagios

# make

# make install

Add nagios to the system services and have it start when system boots

# chkconfig --add nagios

# chkconfig nagios on

Verify the nagios configuration files

# /usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg

# service nagios start

Find out if you have SELinux in Enforced mode

getenforce

Run the following commands to run the CGIs under SELinux enforcing/targeted mode

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /usr/local/nagios/sbin/
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t /usr/local/nagios/share/

Log into the nagios web interface

http://localhost/nagios

Username will be nagiosadmin unless you specified different, plus the password you have set.

You can also add numerous extras from Nagios Exchange.

originated

If you try to access the web interface remotely and the page doesn’t load, check to see if you have IPTABLES enabled

service iptables status

If you don’t see entries for port 80 and/or 443, then it is being denied.

Allow http and https services through IPTABLES:

vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Add the following entries:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

Labels: Centos 6, RHEL install Nagios