Creating maintainable configurations

An enormous effort is required to deploy, configure, and maintain a system that monitors your company's IT infrastructure. The configuration for several hundred machines can take months. The effort required will also depend upon the scope of hosts and services that should be tracked; the more precise the checks need to be, the more time is needed to set these up.

If your company plans to monitor a wide range of hosts and services, you should consider setting up a dedicated server solely for running Nagios. Even though a small Nagios installation consumes few resources, as it grows, Nagios will start using more resources. If you set it to run on the same machine as business-critical applications, it can lead to problems. Therefore, it is always best to set up Nagios on a separate machine right from the beginning—even if the machine has fewer resources than a bigger one, shared with other applications.

A good approach is to start with monitoring only critical...