Deploying a Nagios monitoring server

Nagios is one of the most widely used monitoring servers available. Chef provides you with a cookbook to install a Nagios server, as well as Nagios clients. It provides ways to configure service checks, service groups, and so on, using data bags instead of manually editing Nagios configuration files.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a cookbook named my_cookbook and that the run_list of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in the Creating and using cookbooks recipe in Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure:

1. Create your Berksfile in your Chef repository including the nagios cookbook:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
   cookbook 'resource-control', '~>0.1.2'
   cookbook 'apache2', '~>3.2.2', github: 'sous-chefs/apache2'
   cookbook 'nagios', '~> 7.2.6'
   

2. Install the nagios cookbook:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ berks install
   Using nagios (7.2.6)
   ...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
   

3. Upload the nagios cookbook to the Chef server:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ berks upload...