I was pleased to receive a complimentary copy of James Turnbull’s book Pro Nagios 2.0 (Apress). We use quite a bit of Nagios, and I’m always in search of new ideas. On 360 odd pages, the author discusses Nagios in quite some detail. From installation of Nagios, through object configuration, Turnbull brings the ins and outs of Nagios to the reader. Security and administration, the web console and, of course, monitoring of hosts and services make up a good chunk of the book. I specially liked the discussion of monitoring through firewalls; there are some very interesting solutions there, that I hadn’t thought about. Turnbull discusses SNMP(Simple Network Management Protocol) and a number of additional programs that are useful in conjunction with Nagios (also for Windows systems). In the chapter Advanced Commands, performance data is discussed together with methods of graphing that data; interesting: I must look into that… Chapter seven discusses dependencies and notification escalations in such a way as that the reader can actually grasp the difficult topic. What I liked best was chapter eight: Distributed Monitoring, Redundancy and Failover which goes into the very nitty gritty of getting Nagios to perform even in a disaster case and large installations with multiple Nagios hosts using NSCA(Nagios Service Check Acceptor). Having had some experience in that area, I read that most carefully. In the next chapter, the book discusses integration with syslog-ng, as well as with MRTG and other interesting programs. Developing Nagios plugins and a short discussion of the Nagios Event Broker round off the offerings. Sundry examples and good tips are given throughout all chapters. The only thing I don’t like is that the downloadable source which accompanies the book is full of carriage returns in the files (the author appears to have prepared those on Windows). Apart from that small issue, I strongly recommend this nicely bound and set book to any systems administrator; both those who already use Nagios and especially of course, to those who intend to deploy Nagios. Get a taste of this book by reading Chapter 2: Basic Object Configuration (PDF). I wonder if the next edition of the book (if there is one) will add some blinking lights to Nagios? ;-) Update: BTW(By The Way), O’Reilly have also announced a book on Nagios.