Nagios Network Monitoring Software: Introduction

One day you probably need software to monitor your websites or entire network. What one you should choose?  This article describes Nagios - network monitoring open source software.

Nagios is a free network monitoring software with open source code. Nagios monitors devices, agents, scripts and notifies an administrator about any update in those process (stops and starts).

Nagios's first name was Netsaint and was developed by Ethan Galstad Netsaint. He supports program at the present time also with other developers team.

Nagios was developed for GNU/Linux but it is working on other UNIX systems well. Nagios is distributed according to GNU General Public License Version 2.

What Nagios can monitor?

1. Monitoring of network protocols (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP);
2. Hosts monitoring (processor, disk usage; system logs);
3. SSH and SSL network monitoring;
4. Simple architecture of plugins allows you to creat applications using different computer languages such as (Shell, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, C#);
5. If any service has a problem you will be notified by email, sms or any other method.

Nagios official website is http://www.nagios.org/

I have to add that to configure Nagios network monitoring software you have to posess an Unix administration skills. The process of installation is not so easy for beginners. But Nagios is not only one network monitoring tool. You can always find free and paid online services to monitor your network.

I can recommend free network monitoring service by Dotcom Monitor at http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/network-monitoring.asp You will be asked for simple questions to set up network monitoring agents and you don't need to be a linux guru. Dotcom offers many services of network monitoring: video streaming monitoring; pop3, smpt, ftp and etc. Generally Dotcom offers all those services as Nagios and even more.

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