Nagios installation and monitoring Hosts in CentOS 8/RHEL8

2020/03/25 - Tutorials

What is nagios?

Nagios monitors your entire IT infrastructure to ensure systems, applications, services, and business processes are functioning properly. In the event of a failure, Nagios can alert technical staff of the problem, allowing them to begin remediation processes before outages affect business processes, end-users, or customers.

Prerequisites

1. Setup a LAMP Stack in the server machine

2. Set SELINUX in permissive mode

sed -i 's/SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=permissive/g' /etc/selinux/config
setenforce 0

Step 1: Install dependencies

  • Update the system
dnf update
  • Install Required Packages
yum install gcc glibc glibc-common gd gd-devel make net-snmp openssl-devel xinetd unzip

Step 2: Create user and Group

  • Create a “nagios” user and “nagcmd” group,then add the user to the group
useradd nagios
groupadd nagcmd
usermod -a -G nagcmd nagios

Step 3: Download and Install Nagios core

  • Download the latest version of Nagios
export VER="4.4.5"
curl -SL https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/nagioscore/releases/download/nagios-$VER/nagios-$VER.tar.gz | tar -xzf -
  • Change the directory into nagios Folder
cd nagios-$VER
  • Configure the Nagios before Building it
./configure --with-command-group=nagcmd
  • Compile and Install the Nagios core
make all
make install
make install-commandmode
make install-init
make install-config
make install-webconf

In order to issue external commands via the web interface to Nagios, we must add the web server user, apache, to the nagcmd group

usermod -G nagcmd apache

Step 4: Download and Install nagios plugins

  • Download and install latest version nagios plugins
cd
VER="2.2.1"  
curl -SL https://github.com/nagios-plugins/nagios-plugins/releases/download/release-$VER/nagios-plugins-$VER.tar.gz | tar -xzf -
  • Change to the plugins source directory
cd nagios-plugins-$VER
  • Configure the Nagios Plugins
./configure --with-nagios-user=nagios --with-nagios-group=nagios --with-openssl
  • Compile and install Nagios Plugins
make
make install

Step 5: Downalod and Install NRPE

cd
curl -L -O http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/nag		ios/nrpe-2.x/nrpe-2.15/nrpe-2.15.tar.gz
  • Extract the NRPE archive
tar xvf nrpe-*.tar.gz
  • Change to the extracted directory
cd nrpe-*
  • Configure NRPE before Building it
./configure --enable-command-args --with-nagios-user=nagios --with-nagios-group=nagios --with-ssl=/usr/bin/openssl --with-ssl-lib=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
  • Compile and Install the NRPE
  make all
  make install
  make install-xinetd
  make install-daemon-config
  • Open the xinetd startup script
vi /etc/xinetd.d/nrpe
  • Modify the only_from line by adding the private IP address of the your Nagios server to the end
only_from = 127.0.0.1 YourPrivateIp
  • Restart the xinetd service to start NRPE:
service xinetd restart

Step 6: Editing the configuration files

  • Open the main Nagios configuration file
vi /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg
  • Now find an uncomment this line by deleting the #:
#cfg_dir=/usr/local/nagios/etc/servers
  • Now create the directory that will store the configuration file for each server that you will monitor
mkdir /usr/local/nagios/etc/servers
  • Open a another configuration file ==commands.cfg==
vi /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/commands.cfg
  • Add the following to the end of the file:
define command{
        command_name check_nrpe
        command_line $USER1$/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c $ARG1$
      }
  • Use htpasswd to create an admin user, called “nagiosadmin”, that can access the Nagios web interface:
htpasswd -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin
  • Restart the nagios and apache
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start nagios.service
systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 7: Accessing the Web Interface

Access the web interface with the following command

http://Nagios_server_IP/nagios

Enter the admin user name and Password

After successfully entering the username and password you will be prompted into nagios home page

Step 8: Setting up the Hosts to Monitor

Login into Host server that you need to monitor

  • Install the EPEL repository
yum install epel-release
  • Install Nagios Plugins and NRPE in Host
yum install nrpe nagios-plugins-all
  • Update the NRPE configuration file
vi /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg
  • Find the allowed_hosts directive, and add the private IP address of your Nagios server to the comma-delimited list
allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1,yournagiosserverip
  • Restart NRPE to put the change into effect:
systemctl restart nrpe.service
systemctl enable nrpe.service

Login into Nagios Server and Add the following Changes

  • Edit the Configuration file
vi /usr/local/nagios/etc/servers/yourhost.cfg
  • Add the following code into the file and change the ==host_name== with your host server name , ==address== with your host server ip address, ==alias==value with a description to the host
define host {
        use                             linux-server
        host_name                       hostservername
        alias                           description to the host
        address                         hostserverip
        max_check_attempts              5
        check_period                    24x7
        notification_interval           30
        notification_period             24x7
      }

With the configuration file above, Nagios will only monitor if the host is up or down.

  • Restart the Nagios
systemctl restart nagios
  • Enter to the nagios interface to watch your hosts

Step 9: Adding extra service Blocks

  • You can add extra service blocks in the configuration file to monitor /usr/local/nagios/etc/servers/yourhost.cfg

Adding SSH Service block

define service {
        use                             generic-service
        host_name                       yourhost
        service_description             SSH
        check_command                   check_ssh
        notifications_enabled           0
      }

Adding PING service Block

define service {
        use                             generic-service
        host_name                       yourhost
        service_description             PING
        check_command                   check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
      }

After adding you can monitor the service in nagios web interface( In Image shown below we are monitoring two hosts and their SSH service)

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