Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $24.95

Customer Reviews:

Far and away the best book on Nagios [Posted on 2007-05-31]
I use Nagios heavily at my company and as a result, I've purchased all of the available texts on the subject. This one is simply the best work on Nagios available right now. It's clear and succinct where even the online docs from the Nagios project can be confusing. It covers things that the No Starch volume barely touches on (WMI Scripting and Nagios) and honestly, the diagrams and code samples are clear and useful in real-world application.

Really, buy this one. If you need another one, I would be surprised.

Fantastic Book for New Nagios Users [Posted on 2007-07-05]
This book takes the fairly complicated matter of configuring Nagios for monitoring your network infrastructure and makes it straight forward. Kudos and many things to Mr. Josephsen.

Not Much More Thorough Than Existing Documentation [Posted on 2007-09-24]
It's well written, but it didn't provide much more insights and coverage than reading the existing documentation you can download for free. There are also some glaring gaps in its coverage. There's nothing about passive checks! And I don't think it was written before v3.0 came out.

If you like written docs for stuff you reference often, it will be worth the money. But don't go to it with any significant troubleshooting problem.

Good for quickstart [Posted on 2008-03-01]
Main benefit of this book is that it will teach you many things in a short time. You might want to purchase it if you want a quick start on Nagios, and don't plan to use Nagios on larger systems. Also, although the author's (brief?) style has some benefits, it also has some drawbacks.

Things like distributed monitoring, fail-over, passive checks,... are barely touched. If you are installing Nagios for the first time, you probably won't miss these subjects elaborated, because you will want to have it running soon as possible. However, I think the Apress book covers these advanced topics much better, and gives a more comprehensive overview of Nagios. The decision is up to you. I preferred the lengthier book with more things explained, although it was a bit harder to read.

One more thing that I disliked was that for Passive checks author references Chapter 2. I couldn't find anything about passive checks there, so I checked the Index. No mention of them there either. I gave this book a relatively bad review due to this kind of unclear issues and for the lack of distributed monitoring and failover coverage, which I think is very important for a monitoring system in a serious installation.

As said, some things are better in this book than in Apress one (like ie. Windows check explanation), but in general, Apress book left a better impression on me.

Good but not what I had hoped [Posted on 2008-09-17]
The only thing that I found helpful not in the Nagios documentation is the scripting piece. It provides good ideas for creating nagios configs for large environment quickly. I was looking for at least a detailed information on integrating it with a third party rrd tool such as cacti for creating trends based on historical data.

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