Book Review: Learning Nagios 4 by Wojciech Kocjan

 

Nagios- it is the most effective monitoring tool that actually helps to identify and resolve critical IT infra before they affect critical service operations. Above all, it is an open source community edition tool that actually minimizes total cost of ownership for IT infra business operations.

 

The Author- Wojciech, is a decade experienced System Administrator and Programmer, has perfectly realized the fundamentals of IT infrastructures visibility through deployment of enterprise grade yet community release of Nagios 4. The book, is a perfect handbook for for not only setting up Nagios, but also encourages the reader even more to write customized plugins and scripts. The author coves the Nagios ins and out, adequately that even a newbie user can dare to decide to deploy it effectively.

 

It's always a typical risky call to adopt open source techniques where in cases your business relies on heavily. It's mostly because of lack of accountability and lack of dedicated resources to adopt Open Source Initiative. But, today's fast growing community contributors and author alike Wojciech have taken rich projects and techniques to a level of comfort- yes, the resource are there to avail in publication format. System administrator and integrators really do appreciate and relies on such handbook that truly justifies alike the title- "Learning Nagios 4: Learn how to setup Nagios 4 in order to monitor your systems efficiently."

 

The book is so well thought written and detailed, that even the Nagios documentation and manuals that are available on the developers' site aren't detailed and well thought of enough. Being myself a heavy Nagios platform maintainer, I find myself concise, precise and sufficient narrative materials to follow. I've recommended my industry colleagues and fellow NOC engineers to follow this well documented book to set up Nagios in a more efficient manner than the vanilla installation offers.

 

I must say the author has excellently shared his professional knowledge base not only to a single distro of Linux, but tried to exercise with multiple widely used Linux distribution packages. The author has given plenty of various supporting techniques and 3rd party resources that encompass different interest groups of users.

 

All the chapters are very well organized and cared even the smallest adjustments for a perfect setup and configuration. The entire book has delivered plenty (almost every generic services to monitor you can name about!) of production ready to use command scripts and syntax, that you really don't need to look for elsewhere or even googling 🙂

 

For advanced users, the author has explained nicely on the core structure of Nagios and ways to tweak, specially using templates or custom variables. On Chapter-12 Query Handler, surely will attract the developer's eye and perhaps allure to do more building up Nagios plug-in blocks.

I'd recommend all serious system and cloud admins to read this book as a must. No wonder, the invaluable contributions of the author will enrich to all readers, infra users, NOC engineers and even experienced system integrators.

 

My rating of this book is an absolute "A".

 

Kudos to the author and Packt Publisher for publishing a "Must Keep Nagios Reference Book" for the mass community benefit.

 

Kocjan, Wojciech Learning Nagios 4: Learn how to setup Nagios 4 in order to monitor your systems efficiently, Second Edition- March 2014, Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.