Adding Nagios hosts

Monitoring the local system is different than monitoring remote systems. A big part of this is that while monitoring your local system, you have full access to information regarding number of processes, amount of memory, CPU usage, and so on. When you're looking at remote systems, you're limited to accessing remotely accessible information like if a remote port is listening, ping ability, and so on. If you require the ability to collect more in depth information, you'll need to configure something to make the additional information available.

How to do it…

You can configure additional hosts to be monitored by Nagios by creating additional host entry in a .cfg file within /etc/nagios3/conf.d/.

The content should be:

define host {
        use                     generic-host 
        host_name               testbox
        hostgroups              http-servers,ssh-servers
}

While multiple machines may be defined within the same .cfg file, separate files per machine may make more...