Write yourself some bash scripts that will automate much of the work for you. This way you won't have to spend so much time in front of the computer. I usually install the system, go watch a movie, then run some bash scripts and grab a bite to eat while the scripts do the work for me.

Learning Nagios 3.0 is a comprehensive configuration guide to monitor and maintain your network and systems. It is a practical guide to setting up the Nagios 3.0 open source network monitoring tool, installing and configuring Nagios 3 on various operating systems. It will help understand system monitoring and how Nagios works.

Bash is the default command line interface for many Linux distributions and a powerful scripting language. Here are some suggestions that will keep your Bash scripts efficient and lean. Feel free to comment with your own suggestions.

Nagios provides a monitoring option to evaluate routers and switches using SNMP, Simple Network Management Protocol. This course will show you how to set up Nagios and specifically how to locate the information you want to monitor with SNMP on a Cisco router. This is a Free Course available to anyone.

So you have your Nagios server installed...now what. Monitoring devices on your network is typically a three step process. Once you get used to following these steps you will begin setting many new devices to monitor with this great tool Nagios.

Scripts are files that contain shell commands which may be short or can be very complex. Scripts just make it easier because you can invoke one command to run all of the commands in the script. Here instead of using 8 separate commands you can use one command to execute all of them.

AutoScan-Network is a network discovering and managing Tool. No Special configuration is required to scan your network.

Main Features:
•Multithreaded Scan
•Automatic network discovery
•Realtime detection of any connected equipment
•Supervision of any equipment /service (router, server, firewall, smtp, http, pop)

I've always wanted to know how to create command line options for my Bash scripts. After some research I found there are two functions available to handle this; getopt and getopts. I'm not going to get into the debate about which one is better. getopts is a shell builtin and seems a little easier to implement than getopt, so I'll go with that for now.

Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well.