Nagios Talks Dynamic Monitoring with Sourceforge

Nagios Talks Dynamic Monitoring with Sourceforge

Sourceforge recently spoke with Nagios product development manager Bryan Heden and lead developer Jake Omann about the importance of network monitoring in a world where many industries are increasingly driven by technology.

Due to the differences in technology needs across different ventures, the importance of flexibility was a highly emphasized point in their conversation. “An amazing network monitoring solution will also be highly extensible and offer customization. In the end, no network is the same as any other, and there are massive differences in organizations”, says Heden. A flexible monitoring strategy would allow for successful implementation across diverse infrastructures now, and in the future.

Other key talking points included the need to prioritize visibility and accountability in the way networks are managed, along with their thoughts on the ways open source and machine learning are changing the network monitoring industry.

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Q&A with Nagios: on Network, Server, and Application Monitoring

Today’s dynamic organizations are experiencing rapid network growth due to server virtualization and the increase in both devices and applications that are being connected to the network. As the central hub, the network continues to play a crucial role in streamlining business operations with its ability to monitor performance, one of the most critical points in guaranteeing the stability and security of an organization’s information technology (IT) infrastructure. While employing proper application, server, and network monitoring strategies can be a challenge, this does not have to result in added confusion or even failure.

So how can SMBs and even large enterprises overcome network monitoring hurdles? What should businesses do to successfully deploy network, server, and application monitoring solutions across their entire organization?

To overcome potential network performance challenges and to ensure the stability of an organization’s overall IT infrastructure, businesses should leverage enterprise-grade monitoring solutions. And with Nagios Enterprises’ robust and reliable network, server, and application monitoring systems, businesses can assess the health, availability, and performance of their network (and connected devices) to improve uptime, prevent latency, and streamline operations effectively.

SourceForge had the opportunity to speak with Nagios Enterprises Product Development Manager, Bryan Heden, and Senior Developer, Jake Omann, to discuss the benefits of implementing well-engineered monitoring systems. They also shared some insights on the importance of dynamic solutions for automated deployments and explained how Nagios’ comprehensive IT infrastructure monitoring, data collection, and NetFlow analysis solutions can help organizations make better business decisions.

Q: Can you please give us a brief company overview of Nagios, as well as share with our audience some information about your current solutions and their use cases?

Bryan Heden, Product Development Manager, and Jake Omann, Senior Developer at Nagios

Bryan: Nagios Enterprises was founded by Ethan Galstad in 2007, and the current company size is around 30 employees. We are headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a brand-new office in Wisconsin. Our solutions are used everywhere from SMBs to Enterprise; helping out sectors like government, healthcare, infrastructure, and space exploration. Everyone needs their infrastructure monitored because everything in a modern business is driven by technology. The devices are either on-prem or cloud-based; no matter what it is, it has a pulse that needs to be monitored. That’s where we come in.

Jake: Some people use Nagios’ solutions for compliance purposes. For instance, customers can utilize Nagios Log Server as part of their security and auditing processes. All of the software we produce can be used to monitor internal procedures so that they can remain compliant with the standards they are seeking. Ultimately, we help our clients solve problems.

Q: How has the growth in technology (as well as the advancements in the cloud) helped companies to gain better insight into their networks? How does it compare to ten years ago?

Bryan: Obviously, as technology improves the software built around it also improves. It’s easy to spin up a cloud instance and attach monitors and metrics to it. But in days past, people and whole teams had to go shut down instances and clusters to reallocate resources. Now just about anyone can spin up a cloud instance, attach a few custom automation scripts, and send all of the important data back to the monitoring and graphing solution, making the lives of engineers much easier.

Q: In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges when it comes to managing networks?

Bryan: In my opinion, the two biggest challenges have to be visibility and accountability.

Let’s take for example the common philosophical thought experiment of “if a tree falls in a forest” and apply it to our industry: what happens if fiber node goes down and there is no one around to hear it? If you don’t have the visibility upfront then there’s definitely an issue with your infrastructure in general, and this can lead to bigger issues over time.

In regards to accountability, users need to know who’s doing what, where, and when to help maintain infrastructure in general. There needs to be audit process in place where you can quickly determine whodunnit.

Jake: Along those lines, an even bigger challenge is being able to know when something’s happening in real-time or even before it’s happening. This is a priority because even the smallest amount of downtime can cost organizations large amounts of very real dollars.

Q: Generally speaking, what are some must-haves for companies that want to achieve successful network, server, and application monitoring?

Bryan: One important thing is possessing the ability to do some kind of analysis on what’s currently happening, which is important in all industries (and obviously necessary for auditing and accounting purposes). An amazing network monitoring solution will also be highly extensible and offer customization. In the end, no network is the same as any other, and there are massive differences in organizations. And who knows, maybe you yourself become familiar with using Nagios and you decide to monitor your own networks. The beauty of Nagios is in the customization: plugins, add-ons, etc. that are easy enough to let you make changes so that it works exactly how you want and expect it to.

Jake: Another important thing in regards to a system is the status of the network, applications, and/or databases. All system and network administrators have a need for quality metrics so that at the end of the day they can take a look back and visually analyze that collected data.

The key component is where Nagios gives [customers] the ability to not only coordinate alerts and notifications but also to record performance data so you can view that data over the lifetime of the device.

Q: Talk to us a bit more about your products: Nagios XI, Nagios Log Server, Nagios Network Analyzer, Nagios Fusion, Nagios Core. What differentiates them from one another?

Bryan: Nagios XI is our flagship product, it was built off of Nagios Core and extends the functionality and user interface. At the heart of a healthy monitoring setup, you’re likely to find XI.

Nagios Core was developed to schedule checks for hosts/services – objects in your infrastructure – hosts can be things like workstations, servers, routers. Services can be less tangible; things like the CPU load and available memory of those workstations or servers. The beauty is in the customization, anything can be a host or a service. If you can interface with it, you can check it – this goes as far as to say you could turn a business process into a host or a service.

Like I said, Nagios XI was built to extend the functionality of Core. It allows you to see historical performance data for the hosts and services you’re monitoring along with providing you access to view and schedule advanced reports (things like Bandwidth Usage, SLA, Availability, etc.). There’s a lot more to it, but it’s probably too much to list here; if I had to sum it up I’d say something like “all-in-one monitoring solution.”

Jake: Nagios Log Server is different, it’s something that allows you to collect log data and set up alerts based on that data.

You can also query the log data to check for something that is going wrong, such as too many failed ssh attempts or an attacking system. You can create your own dashboards with saved queries so that you can see the data you want at the click of a mouse. We actually just released Nagios Log Server 2 that offers a variety of enhancements over previous versions.

Nagios Network Analyzer is like Log Server for network data. It supports receiving NetFlow, sFlow, and J-Flow data from routers, network devices, and machines. You can then see where your data is going and how much bandwidth is being utilized on your network.

Nagios Fusion allows you to connect Nagios XI and Nagios Core instances (and very soon Nagios Log Server clusters). That way you can log in to one centralized interface and see data from multiple monitoring systems at once.

Q: Can you speak on behalf of Nagios’ involvement with the open source community? How do you believe open source has helped to change the business networking and data industries for the better?

Bryan: Nagios Core was built as an open source application, and it launched an entire open source ecosystem. Besides our enterprise solutions, we have a few open source projects. There’s also the equally important Nagios Plugins project. The plugins are a collection of commands that allow you to monitor hosts, devices, protocols, applications, etc. with Nagios.

We have a project that helps you store your Nagios related data in a database, and there are a few open source applications that allow you to monitor remote hosts (NCPA for example).

The community is constantly contributing exciting plugins and miscellaneous projects. We host the Nagios Exchange, where community members can upload and share their Nagios creations.

Open source helps all industries tremendously. When the community comes together to collaborate on non-competitive tech, everyone wins. Open source breeds innovation because everyone is welcome to contribute.

Q: What market trends, industry movements, or customer desires are shaping the future of Nagios? Does Nagios have any new projects they are currently working on or are pursuing?

Jake: I think there’s a couple of places, as a general overview, where I think the industry is moving, and I would say that an industry trend we are seeing is something more like automation and the auto-provisioning of things. I think we’re going to see a lot more stuff coming down the road in these areas.

Bryan: I think machine learning and AI are the future. I’m excited to see a world where your Nagios Plugins can do advanced learning of whatever device you’re monitoring as soon as you execute your first check. We aren’t quite there, yet – but let’s say it could make it on the roadmap one day.

As of late, DevOps, in general, has seen a giant rise in popularity. We are right there in the midst of this trend, and we have some exciting things on the horizon. If I could say anything, it would be these two words: stay tuned.