Nagios
June 3rd, 2004 by HenNot Java, but something I’ve meant to look at for years now. Originally NetSaint and now called Nagios, I noticed the Apache admin team mentioning it and let my browser wander over to nagios.org.
Half an hour later I had a running system [compiling nagios and nagios-plugins from source]. The documentation warns that is not for the faint-hearted, but I found their warnings to be (rarely for a computer project) over the top. You do have to do a fair bit to get it going, but this is largely a question of following some pretty blatant instructions and then figuring out a dozen configuration files. This is easier than it sounds.
It’s now running at work to tell me if the printer’s webserver goes down (highly important, we might run out of toner!), and at home against my own machines. It has an oracle plugin, so I’ll give that a try at work too and start delving into custom checkers for our system at work.
In other, more Java related news, I’m starting to dedicate a little time towards Commons Lang 2.1, and continue to work with Roller at home for the new blog, which will hopefully beat the baby to a release date.