Monitoring Nagios performance with nagiostats

In this recipe, you'll learn how to use the nagiostats utility to get some statistics about the performance of a Nagios Core process and the states of the hosts and services that it monitors.

Optionally, we'll also show you how to use the mrtg.cfg file built in the Nagios Core source distribution at the ./configure time to set up graphs built by mrtg (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) and to link to the graphs in the menu of the web interface. The Nagios Core source distribution includes some ready-made files to assist with this, which we'll use here.

Getting ready

You will need a Nagios Core 4.0 server or newer server installed and running to invoke nagiostats. Older versions do include the utility, but there is not quite as much information that is returned.

If you would like to run the mrtg graphing as well, which is highly recommended, you should have mrtg and its helper program indexmaker installed on your system. If you are already graphing other...