Nagios NRDP – Introduction And Prerequisites
Introduction
Nagios is a an open source monitoring solution for network devices and servers. Nagios NRDP (Nagios Remote Data Protocol) is designed to be a flexible data transport mechanism and processor for Nagios, built on top of web technologies which are becoming a more popular transport mechanism. It is designed with a simple and powerful architecture that allows for it to be easily extended and customized to fit individual users’ needs.
This following pages of this article explain how to configure distributed monitoring in Nagios using NRDP to send check results from a separate Nagios Core server to Passive Hosts and Services on a central Nagios Core server. This configuration is to simulate utilising a separate Nagios monitoring server for a separate data centre or customer data centre with the check results being fed back to a central NOC or managed service providers monitoring server.
Test Environment
The test environment for this set of articles consists of the following:
- Central Nagios Core monitoring server
- General Details
- Name – NAG-CENTRAL
- IP – 192.168.0.100
- Specification
- Raspberry Pi Model 2
- Raspian Buster Lite
- Nagios Core 4.4.5 installed and basic configuration completed
- Apache installed and nagios integration completed
- General Details
- Firewall
- General Details
- FIREWALL-REMOTE
- External IP – 192.168.0.215
- Internal IP – 10.100.100.215
- General Details
- Remote Nagios Core monitoring server
- General Details
- Name – NAG-REMOTE
- IP – 10.100.100.200
- Specification
- ESXi VM, 2vCPUS, 2GB RAM, 20GB Disk
- CentOS 7 64-Bit
- Nagios Core 4.4.5 installed and basic configuration completed
- Apache installed and nagios integration completed
- General Details
The NAG-REMOTE server sits behind the Remote Firewall with no access allowed from the NAG-CENTRAL server. The FIREWALL-REMOTE is configured to allow outbound communication on TCP 80 from NAG-REMOTE to NAG-CENTRAL.
Installation Overview
The configuration is broken down in to the following steps which are explained in the subsequent sections of this article :-
- Installing and testing NRDP
- Setting up the test environment
- Central Server – Configuring Passive checks
- Remote Server – Configuring a send_nrdp Global Event Commands
Prerequisites
In order to install and configure NRDP for distributed monitoring the following pre-requisites must be met :-
Central Monitoring Server
- Nagios Core 4.4.5 installed and base configuration performed
- Apache installed and base Nagios configuration performed
Remote Monitoring Server
- Nagios Core 4.4.5 installed and base configuration performed
- Apache installed and base Nagios configuration performed