System monitoring tool Nagios offers a powerful mechanism for receiving events and commands from external applications. External commands are usually sent from event handlers or from the Nagios Web interface. You will find external commands most useful when writing event handlers for your system, or when writing an external application that interacts with Nagios.

Recently, Nagios, an open source application for network, server and application monitoring, has been the subject of a dispute. The operators of the French Nagios site nagios-fr.org claimed that Nagios Enterprises was forcing them to give up the domain. The H talked to Ethan Galstad CEO of Nagios Enterprises about what had happened and asked how he plans to take the Nagios community forward

This Nagios Mini-Course shows you how to configure Passive Checks from clients which are sent to a central Nagios Server. Passive checks use the NSCA or Nagios Service Check Adaptor which is an add-on for the Nagios Server. You can write custom scripts to evaluate applications and send the output to a central Nagios Server.

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.

Nagios is the foundation for many networking applications world wide and is know for its flexibility. Building upon those concepts is a new project named the Nagios Visual Shell (V-Shell). What follows is a short review of V-Shell and an interview with the lead developer of this new Nagios project.

This is part two of a three part series on distributed monitoring. You can use passive service and host checks to allow non-central Nagios servers to collect data from a network of machines and then transfer that information to a central Nagios server.

Did you know you can easily change the way Nagios looks? Nagios has a number of options for frontends, or skins for the Nagios web interface. These frontends change the look of Nagios. Often these frontends are a matter of preference as they do not change the functionality of the program at all. They are easily changed and and restored if you follow some basic principles.

As many of you know, a recent fork of Nagios has been announced, accompanied with a flurry of activity in both the community and press. An email thread titled “Nagios is dead! Long live Icinga!” began last week on the nagios-devel mailing list to kick this off.

Before you update your Nagios XI server be sure to create a good backup that could be used to recover if there are problems. This article provides you a script that you can use to backup Nagios XI before an upgrade and shows how to perform the upgrade of Nagios.