Installing Nagios to Monitor VM's

This post will go over installing nagios on a centos machine that lives on a vmware esxi host.  Nagios is an open source monitoring and alerting system that is widely deployed as an infrastructure monitoring solution and can scale from one to thousands of hosts and services.  This post will go over a basic installation.

Step 1:
Clone a machine.

cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1
mkdir "CentOS 6.4 - Nagios Server"
cd CentOS\ 6.4\ -\ Nagios\ Server/
cp ../Base CentOS\ 6.4/Base CentOS\ 6.4.vmx ./CentOS\ 6.4\ -\ Nagios\ Server.vmx
vmkfstools -i ../Base CentOS\ 6.4/Base CentOS\ 6.4.vmdk \
CentOS\ 6.4\ -\ Nagios\ Server.vmdk
vim-cmd solo/registervm \
/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/CentOS\ 6.4\ -\ Nagios\ Server/CentOS\ 6.4\ -\ Nagios\ Server.vmx
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on 21

Step 2:
If necessary, reset the ip addresses and the interfaces in /etc/sysconfig/networ-scripts/ifcfg-*, modify udev rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, reset the hostname in /etc/sysconfig/network, reset the root password.

Step 3:
Add the EPEL repository.

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Step 4:
Install nagios and necessary packages.

yum install -y nagios* openssl gd gd-devel httpd php gcc glibc glibc-common httpd

Step 5:
Set up apache and enable services.

htpasswd /etc/nagios/passwd nagiosadmin
chkconfig httpd on
chkconfig nagios on
service httpd restart
service nagios restart

Step 6:
Verify the system is up and monitoring the localhost at http://<systemip>/nagios

A later post will go over adding new hosts and services to the setup.