Nagios

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Nagios offers a complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services.

Nagios is written in perl.

Installation

Web server

Decide which web server will be to used and set it up:

• Apache with PHP
• Lighttpd with PHP
• Nginx with PHP and fcgiwrap

Once finished return here to and continue reading.

USE flags

Set the proper USE flags for Nagios before it emerging it:

USE flags for net-analyzer/nagios-core Nagios core - monitoring daemon, web GUI, and documentation

+web	enable web interface
apache2	Add Apache2 support
classicui	use the classic web theme
lighttpd	install www-servers/lighttpd config
vim-syntax	Pulls in related vim syntax scripts

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2024-04-30 18:21 More information about USE flags

Do not forget to enable the right USE flags for Nagios plugins (net-analyzer/nagios-plugins).

Emerge

Finally install net-analyzer/nagios:

root #emerge --ask net-analyzer/nagios

Configuration

Apache

Enable the Nagios module for Apache:

FILE /etc/conf.d/apache2

APACHE2_OPTS="... -D NAGIOS"

Since Nagios requires PHP for its web interface, it may needed to be enabled as well if it has not been previously. One way is to simply add -D PHP5 to APACHE2_OPTS and edit /etc/php/apache2-php<YOUR_PHP_VERSION>/php.ini This should be fine unless PHP is needed for purposes other than hosting Nagios.

If using Apache 2.4 (which is still marked unstable as of April 2015) the /etc/apache2/modules.d/99_nagios3.conf file may need to be modified to fit the new authorization directives of Apache 2.4.

Remember to add the apache user to group nagios:

root #usermod -a -G nagios apache

Restart the Apache service to have it recognize the group change:

root #rc-service apache2 restart

Lighttpd

Enable the Nagios configuration for Lighttpd:

FILE /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

include "nagios.conf"

Configure authentication. More information on how to set this up can be found in the Lighttpd documentation.

FILE /etc/lighttpd/nagios.conf

$HTTP["url"] =~ "nagios" {
    auth.backend ="plain"    # The password is stored as plain text as user:password in...
    auth.backend.plain.userfile = "/etc/nagios/passwd"  # this file
    auth.require = ( "" => (
        "method" => "digest",
        "realm" => "nagios",
        "require" => "user=nagiosadmin"
        )
    )
    setenv.add-environment = ( "REMOTE_USER" => "user" )
}

Restart the Lighttpd service:

root #rc-service lighttpd restart

You may have to create the run folder for lighttpd

root #mkdir -p /run/lighttpd; chown lighttpd /run/lighttpd

Nginx

See the Nginx guide before continuing if you don't have it already setup.

Emerge www-servers/spawn-fcgi and www-misc/fcgiwrap:

root #emerge --ask www-servers/spawn-fcgi www-misc/fcgiwrap

Next, create an init script for a spawn-fcgi instance dedicated to nagios:

root #ln -s /etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi /etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi.nagios

root #cp /etc/conf.d/spawn-fcgi /etc/conf.d/spawn-fcgi.nagios

Then, configure our spawn-fcgi instance to launch fcgiwrap and listen on a unix socket:

FILE /etc/conf.d/spawn-fcgi.nagios

# edit these variables:
FCGI_SOCKET=/run/fcgiwrap.nagios.socket
FCGI_USER=nagios
FCGI_GROUP=nginx
FCGI_EXTRA_OPTIONS="-M 0660"
FCGI_PORT= # must be empty for the socket to work
FCGI_PROGRAM=/usr/sbin/fcgiwrap

Don't forget to add spawn-fcgi.nagios to the default runlevel and start it:

root #rc-update add spawn-fcgi.nagios default

root #rc-service spawn-fcgi.nagios start

You may need to change the owner of the /var/nagios folder, so fcgiwrap can access it:

root #chown nagios:nagios /var/nagios

Nginx can now be configured to serve our nagios instance. Here's an example configuration snippet for nginx, assuming you have defined a php upstream:

FILE /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

location /nagios {
        alias /usr/share/nagios/htdocs;

        location ~ \.php$ {
                # Filter out arbitrary code execution
                location ~ \..*/.*\.php$ {return 404;}
                fastcgi_pass php;
                include fastcgi.conf;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
        }

        location /nagios/cgi-bin/ {
                root /usr/lib/;
                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_param  AUTH_USER nagiosadmin;
                fastcgi_param  REMOTE_USER nagiosadmin;
                if ($uri ~ "\.cgi$"){
                        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/fcgiwrap.nagios.socket-1;
                }
        }
}

Permissions

Add the user name(s) to the nagios group, whom are allowed access to the Nagios service:

root #gpasswd -a <USER_NAME> nagios

Once done, completely sign out from all shells and re-login for the update to apply.

Boot service

Start Nagios:

root #rc-service nagios start

To start Nagios at boot time, add it the default runlevel:

root #rc-update add nagios default

Testing

Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost/nagios

Troubleshooting

• Gentoo bugtracker: known bugs

See also

• The Gentoo Nagios system monitoring guide.