Diary of a Network Geek

Well, since I bought it, I think I should review it.

So, I’ve been wrestling with the typically mediocre documentation which surrounds most OpenSource projects and, in an effort to ramp up my efforts, I bought Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios by David Josephsen. Now, keep in mind that I don’t normally read entire computer books very much any more, but rather read just the few chapters that seem most relevant to my current project and keep the book for future reference. Also, I was in a hurry when I bought this book and didn’t have time to look at it very closely before purchase.

Now, all that being said, this book wasn’t all that helpful to me. It probably would have been a great help if I’d gotten it right when I was starting to install Nagios, though. Sadly, I puzzled out most of what I needed to know about the system the hard way, via on-line help files, how-tos, and trial and error.
With a table of contents broken up into eight chapters, titled; Best Practices, Theory of Operations, Installing Nagios, Configuring Nagios, Bootstrapping the Configs, Watching, Visualization, and Nagios Even Broker Interface, you can see that this book is about installing the base system and monitoring the most basic of services. I got the book hoping to monitor an SQL database and, if possible, the completion status of backups. Sadly, that’s not covered in this book. I did manage to find more information on-line regarding the SQL database monitoring, but not about watching backups.

So, mostly, this book didn’t get done what I was after. However, since there are things wrong with my installation, I may save the configuration files, wipe the server and start over, following the principles laid out in this book. For instance, I can’t seem to get scheduled down-time set via the web interface on my installation, which should be possible by default. And, the visualization on my monitoring server leaves something to be desired, so, if I start over, I’ll reference the chapter on Visualization. Certainly, it would be nice to start from a clean slate and do it right, but I may not have time to do that. We’ll see.

In short, Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios was a bit of a disappointment for me, but not because it wasn’t a good book. Rather, by the time I bought this book, I was a little past implementing most of the strategies discussed. Again, though, if I end up starting over, which I may, I’ll definitely read more of this book to get it done the right way.