Knowledge Level: Any

Founder Ethan Galstad and CTO Scott Wilkerson share new developments and future directions for Nagios.

Knowledge Level: Any

Solutions Covered: All

Founder Ethan Galstad and CTO Scott Wilkerson share new developments and future directions for Nagios.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

In the red corner, "The Thunder" from down under, proficient in everything Nagios XI, here to defend his 3 MVP awards is Troy Lea. In the blue corner, hailing from Western New York, the master of Nagios Core, chomping at the bit to earn his 3rd MVP award is Eric "Lights Out" Loyd. Our two opponents will battle it out against each other, proving that their Nagios version of choice can do whatever is thrown at them. They each will be given two customer scenarios to implement Nagios for the customer. Troy will serve up Nagios XI solutions, and Eric will throw down Nagios Core solutions. Don't miss the Event Handler of the year, the Melee for Monitoring: Lea versus Loyd! Only at the Nagios World Conference, 2016!

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Recently investigating security systems for smaller offices, Sean wondered why wouldn't they not just do it with Nagios? Their low-cost solutions were really not adequate and the revenue of the smaller offices didn't justify the high-cost security systems. Using network-connected security devices and monitoring them with Nagios, we can build a highly effective security system for our offices with central monitoring and a wonderful visual user interface powered by nagvis.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: All

Sean will go through ways to identify log data sources, setup inputs, basic grok filters and dashboards which provide meaningful insight into log data. You will also look at using alerts to then feed the data back into your service desk software or e-mail system so that you know when things are not performing well.

Knowledge Level: Any

Solutions Covered: All

This presentation will provide a high-level introduction to the various Nagios solutions that are available - including Nagios XI, Core, Network Analyzer, Fusion, and Log Server. The talk will cover what each solution does, what benefits it provides, and how it is typically used. A great introduction to the Nagios software suite for individuals looking to learn more about what Nagios can do.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility has created its own in-house visualization for displaying Nagios data. Learn how you can leverage the APIs and web technologies to do the same.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Learn how to create your own custom Nagios plugins to expand your monitoring capabilities.

Knowledge Level: Any

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

In this talk I will present my TRUNC (Two-wheeled Robot Using Nagios Core) project, in which I use various functionalities of Nagios Core to control a raspberry pi-based robot, using an off-the-shelf two-wheeled robotics kit. The original motivation for this project was mostly the geek factor, but as I thought about it more I realized it would be a fun way to teach Nagios Core concepts in a way that is intuitive - passive checks can be used to control the wheels, active checks can be used to determine distance from a wall, event handlers are nice for avoiding crashing into those walls if the distance check goes critical, and notifications can include lights, sound, and even taking a picture with the onboard camera!

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Network Analyzer

David will discuss how to set up a public cloud infrastructure to run Nagios. He will be using his setup as the design template, a distributed monitoring solution for his multi-location on-prem and multi-cloud enterprise infrastructure. He will cover the AWS products that we use (VPC, EC2, RDS, Direct Connect, SES, etc), how to set them up, and will include lower cost, alternative options, e.g. using a VPN instance instead of Direct Connect. He will compare Azure options and discuss a multi-cloud environment. Finally, I will go over how they use the Nagios products.

TBD

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

A solution to the issue of long-running plugins using CPU and other resources on the Nagios host platform, Mod Gearman allows the easy offloading of such tasks. This presentation goes one step further by showing how to deploy IoT devices such as the Raspberry Pi to act as a resource cloud to offload plugin workloads. A particular study using check_WMI will be shown and the before & after performance figures discussed.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Network Analyzer

This presentation will cover the implementation of Nagios Network Analyzer to monitor and report on network traffic. This will include: - Handling input streams from Palo Alto firewalls and HP Core switches in a two site production environment. - Traffic types & flows analyzed and reported on. - Integration into Nagios Core is also covered. - Genuine real life experience of a production implementation of this Nagios product

Knowledge Level: Advanced

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

It can be a hassle managing a valid SSL certificate for securing a Nagios web interface (Core OR XI), but now there is a simple solution: Let's Encrypt. Create a valid SSL Certificate that is trusted in all current browsers, renewed automatically, and avoids the nag popups of a self-signed certificate or the cost of a commercial one. This session will show how to setup Let's Encrypt on both Core AND XI systems!

Knowledge Level: Beginner

The Raspberry Pi has been mainstream for many years. This presentation is an update on the current hardware options. You will learn how to create a deployable Nagios appliance for less than $100 [hardware cost], including a camera for visual monitoring of the server room as well as environment monitoring for temperature, humidity, and pressure!

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Applying the micro services architecture pattern is a good practice to ease development of Java EE applications. The inherent complexity is effectively reduced by segmenting the application into small independent units that communicate with each other via standardized RESTful APIs. Although such a segmentation simplifies the work of developers, the large number and interaction of micro services may make it difficult to set up a Nagios environment in order to monitor the health of the application. In this talk, Konstantin will show you how you can leverage the Spring Boot Actuator project in order to automate the deployment of Java micro services that are monitorable by Nagios. Thereby he will also show a plugin that allows Nagios to handle Actuator messages. As a result, you will make your Nagios server produce an in-depth health analysis of your Java EE application and its micro services.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Notification is an important area of monitoring practice. Overnotification, in-band-notification, devices failing can all be a problem. This presentation will cover the topic of notification and suggest best practices such as: 1. weekly review of top alert producers 2. out-of-band notification method 3. device suggestions 4. how to construct a device which shoots ping pong balls for critical problems (for when the phone doesn't wake you) This will be a serious presentation but include a little bit of entertainment, which is the home-made ping-pong gun.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI

A simple methodology change can allow a huge reduction of service definitions. The Nagios system will be easier to use and will have increased flexibility. Multiple, nearly identical services, will no longer be needed. Steven will show how to have ONE service definition per 'type of test' and use free variables to pass configuration data. This will allow for common configurations, and will allow for per host deviations from the common.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: All

An interactive "Nagios Fails, Bloopers, and Catastrophic Mistakes" session for a little light-hearted fun, but will also educational.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI

This talk is for beginners who have a new Nagios installation and are looking for ideas and guidance on what to do next.

Knowledge Level: Advanced

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

In this presentation, you will learn how to use Tasker on Android to send Passive Monitoring Checks to Nagios.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

In the red corner, "The Thunder" from down under, proficient in everything Nagios XI, here to defend his 3 MVP awards is Troy Lea. In the blue corner, hailing from Western New York, the master of Nagios Core, chomping at the bit to earn his 3rd MVP award is Eric "Lights Out" Loyd. Our two opponents will battle it out against each other, proving that their Nagios version of choice can do whatever is thrown at them. They each will be given two customer scenarios to implement Nagios for the customer. Troy will serve up Nagios XI solutions, and Eric will throw down Nagios Core solutions. Don't miss the Event Handler of the year, the Melee for Monitoring: Lea versus Loyd! Only at the Nagios World Conference, 2016!

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Let's step back for a moment and understand what it means to monitor our infrastructure, applications and business process from a higher level. How do we approach our role in the org chart and the value that monitoring brings to our operations? When your management team asks for a "single pane of glass", how do you answer them? Spoiler, there is no "single pane". Attendees will hear some hard lessons I've learned over 20 years in IT. While not product specific, Andrew will cover how he uses Nagios XI, Log Server, and Network Analyzer to provide better data to back his business partners.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: All

Kunjumon is a framework that can be used to create plugins for Nagios monitoring system, with no need to write code. The plugins thus created are robust, and, can monitor complex application and business scenarios by querying data from multiple databases. While independent efforts to build such plugins would require considerable scripting work, by using the Kunjumon framework, a plugin that fetches info from databases for monitoring can be implemented by configuring it in JSON or XML format. The Kunjumon framework is supported on all major Linux platforms, and databases such as MySQL, Postgres, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. In general, it would work with any ODBC to access any data repository. Kunjumon 1.0 has been available since 09/2014 on the Nagios Plugin Exchange. The upcoming 2.0 release is completely rewritten in Python and added support for JSON as the configuration language. The focus of this presentation is to describe the Kunjumon framework in detail and its uses in a multi-database data-repository environment. The demo will also showcase its main features.

Knowledge Level: Advanced

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

This presentation will go over the benefits of using WMI and how to customize CheckWMIPlus.

Knowledge Level: Advanced

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

This presentation will discuss Linear Least-Squares Trend in RRD and how to build a Nagios Alert on Trend.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Let AutoDiscover check your network on a daily basis and let Nagios send an alert if a new host is found which was not already added to your Nagios configuration. The AutoDiscover can also be used on a Nagios XI installation.

Knowledge Level: Advanced

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

This presentation will show a project of a Mobile Interface for Android e iOS that receives and process all checks from a Nagios daemon using web sockets. You will learn: -How the app is structured -How Ricardo achieved no overhead in his Nagios installation while sending more than 22k checks directly from Nagios Core to a cell phone.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: All

This presentation will cover how to achieve High Availability and Disaster Recovery on Linux operating systems using DRBD, Linux-HA, Pacemaker, and Heartbeat. The demo will feature an offloaded MySQL DB as it seems that many interested clients have considered this. Including: Cost of Downtime Define High Availability = not a backup and RPO's Raid or Raid over the network (DRBD) The Linux cluster stack Cluster management with Pacemaker Disaster Recovery (Proxy)/ Linking sites for HA and geo-clustering. Use in VM infrastructure. DRBD Manage for quickly setting up clusters. Demo of Nagios XI 5 HA

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

What security concerns keep you up at night? Is it pass-the-hash, pivoting, the time to detect a compromise, or one of a thousand other possibilities? Do you already have tools in your enterprise to help protect your organization that you are not using? Why spend more hours and more budget implementing a new product with new agents and new headaches that will not effectively reduce your workload? Even if you already have commercial tools monitoring your systems for security events, how do you know they are working? In this presentation, Dallas will explore the practicality of using customized PowerShell scripts/plugins, built-in event logs, and a traditional monitoring tool such as Nagios to search for indicators of compromise on Windows systems. In addition, he will provide applied research, easy to follow guidelines, and scripts attendees can integrate into their own environment in order to improve their detection of numerous high-risk incidents. Much of this project is an extension of the NSA whitepaper titled, Spotting the Adversary. In many ways, this work automates several of the techniques discussed there and integrates those tests into an existing alert-based dashboard (Nagios), which is standardly used for NOC only functions.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI

James will demonstrate how IT Convergence automated their NRPE configuration updates and also show some of the many ways they have taken advantage of the new API in XI 5. Examples include spreadsheets that have complex formulas allowing previously hours of work to be done in a matter of a minute and a new component used in house to add new hosts with standard checks.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI

This talk is a case study on how the University of St. Thomas got network performance monitoring in residence halls for the cost of some Raspberry Pi computers and a bit of time. This data enables them to keep tabs on the network performance even when they aren't around. A few years into this process they've expanded more locations, and can reliably tell what the user experience is like and if it has degraded or improved. With a combination of low-cost hardware, time, and persistence, you can replicate our monitoring success.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI

By using Nagios XI NRPE, SNMP and SNMP Traps, Siemens Rail Automation successfully set up a centralized monitoring station for the whole railway networked objects, which makes their client's maintenance job easier and efficient.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Infrastructure and application monitoring thru the course of technology maturity has changed positions. Not so long ago monitoring was an after thought when rolling out your new application or standing up your new rack of servers. More recently I have observed monitoring to be one of the first considerations, to the point where it is actually in the initial project plan. Now with Cloud being the new primary infrastructure approach, it only makes sense that monitoring of those cloud platforms/resources become center stage. In this talk, Walter will demonstrate how you can take the top open source cloud platform (OpenStack) and use the leading open source monitoring platform (Nagios) to monitor that cloud in order to provide a highly available production ready cloud. Attendee takeaways: * Review OpenStack and understand how Nagios adds value * Walk thru the configurations and plugins used * Share the Nagios best practices put in place * Demonstrate how the Nagios monitoring configs can be automated * Review the complete end to end solution on a working OpenStack cloud

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

This presentation will cover the scripts used in the use of two servers with virtualized Nagios in XEN, synchronized via Rsync, which show on the console status summary red (critical), yellow (advertence), purple (unknown) or green (ok) to refresh every minute and an alarm sounds according to the colors and send email with this summary every hour if the server via one odd and if is even via the server 2.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

JaM is a PHP monitoring system that supports storing PHP errors (events) into different storage backends. It is implemented as a PHP extension that can be used monitor any PHP based app at the Zend Engine level, without having to make any changes to your app or parse the error logs. It can capture multiple event types, including fatal Zend Engine errors. The events JaM captures can be sent to multiple backends such as email, an ElasticSearch server, SNMP. etc. JaM is a FOSS project licensed under AGPLv3, it's code resides here: https://github.com/jessp01/jam The session will review the general architecture and code and will demo a live application reporting events to Nagios.

Knowledge Level: Any

Solutions Covered: All

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

This presentation describes how Nagios (Nagios® Core™ Version 3.2.3) helps Edvin to establish a VoIP system for his business customers. The VoIP system intended for business customers is known as IP Centrex (Central Exchange). With Nagios, they have a stable VoIP system which has all the benefits of IP and NGN network and moreover regarding the quality of service it is same as POTS.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Tasked with deploying Nagios Core to an internal IBM organization which has 5500+ hosts across 7 sites, Derek and his team designed, developed and deployed a Nagios solution eight years ago. Since then, they have continually implemented and developed many tools ranging from mass functions within the web UI to custom dashboards and reporting tools pulling real-time stats from all the Nagios instances. They utilize Livestatus, pnp4nagios, NSClient++, SNMP, custom CGIs, multiple Nagios instances per server and a custom HA solution. Because their organization is worldwide, they utilize teams in the U.S., India, and Mexico as well as a 24x7 staffed team in Vermont to respond to any alerts that occur. Their well versed in advanced configuration tips and tricks as well as the logistics of testing, upgrading, identifying services to be monitored, dialing in threshold sensitivities, dealing with excessive notifications, training administrators and most any other issue that has come up along the way.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI

This is a case study of how Aaron's company (PhoneSuite) uses Nagios to monitor with passive checks over 300 IP based phone systems in hotels in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Haiti. He will discuss what they monitor (system up/down, SIP trunks, SIP phones, basic phone system usage stats, and current public IP address of the system), how they monitor (5 minute checks, vs. 4 or 24 hour checks) the benefits and challenges with passive checks, how checks and deployment strategy has developed, and best practices he wishes he had started with.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Monitoring, is a Love/hate relationship, but when do you really need to start using it to get the best results ? In this presentation, Assaf will discuss the topic of when it is best to start monitoring your products. Open source monitoring and cloud architecture make starting your monitoring that much easier and cheaper than most people think or are aware of. Assaf will talk about why and when you may want to start monitoring, talk about the common mistakes present in many places in the industry, and we will discuss why it needs to change, and how to change it.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

While researching Nagios agents for his current role, Jeremy found that most agents for Nagios have their shortcomings - they may not work on a required OS, they may only support active or passive checks, they may require more time than desired to manage. Jeremy tried a number of options, and while he learned a lot about Nagios in the process - even becoming a moderator on the /r/Nagios subreddit - but in the end, it looked like he was going to be managing a combination of agents and agentless connections to cover the entire environment, increasing demands on his time as configuration became more complex. The Nagios Cross-Platform Agent (NCPA) seeks to address this, and as a result, they are now using NCPA as the sole Nagios agent in our production environment. In this presentation, Jeremy will review the strengths and weaknesses of several leading Nagios agents, then dive into deploying, using, and extending NCPA. Live demonstration to include: - Installation of NCPA on Linux and Windows - Management of NCPA tokens via host variables - Interaction with the API via curl and web browser - Adding custom plugins to both OSes - Using NCPA for both active and passive checks

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

This presentation talks about designing and building a Nagios-based availability scoring system for a large international cyber defense exercise Locked Shields. The existing solution was replaced by a new modular setup that is built around a well-known open-source IT monitoring software called Nagios Core.

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Core

Learn how to use Git and Ansible to create a workflow to deploy any change inside nrpe.cfg or any configuration file you want to your servers. The primary idea is that you can have all your nrpe.cfg and other configuration files inside your local machine and use an SCM tool (Git) to control modifications, with that, Ansible can easily synchronize files for all your Nagios infrastructure. The benefits of this architecture is: - Easy to audit configuration changes - Historical asset of all changes of a file/server - Quickly bulk changes to all your Nagios infrastructure

Knowledge Level: Intermediate

Solutions Covered: Nagios Fusion

SKA (Square Kilometer Array) is a project to design and build a large radio-telescope, composed using thousands of antennae and related support systems (timing generation, signal real-time processing and so on). The orchestration of this large and complex facility is performed by the Telescope Manager (TM), a suite of software applications aimed to manage observations (preparation and execution), signal processing and scientific data delivery, as well as gathering all status and performance data from the facility. In order to ensure the proper and uninterrupted operation of TM, a local monitoring and control system (TM.LMC) is being developed. Among its responsibilities, monitoring, lifecycle control and fault management are of the utmost importance. For the very central activity of LMC monitoring, Nagios has been selected as the best solution to monitor TM resources, services and the status of processes both at generic level (directly achieved by Nagios) and at performance level. For this specific purpose, a configurable custom agent is under development. It is handled by lifecycle manager, sends monitoring data and generates alarms based on the logic of the specific TM applications that can be based on the Tango-controls framework (a CORBA-based interface to control each element of the telescope, which the SKA overall architecture is based on), together with standard web-based applications or generic scripts. The details of this work are described in this presentation.

Knowledge Level: Beginner

Solutions Covered: Nagios XI