If you want a quick monitoring solution with a comprehensive list of automatically generated checks then check_mk is the way to go.
Requirements for this guide
- Ubuntu 14.04 Server
- Running Nagios3 installation
Agent
On the systems that you want to monitor you have to install the check-mk-agent and the xinetd package from the Ubuntu repos. Also recommended is the check-mk-agent-logwatch package.
Open the /etc/xinetd.d/check_mk file and change the disabled attribute from yes to no. Also uncomment the only_from attribute and adapt accordingly.
Restart the xinetd daemon:
/etc/init.d/xinetd restart
And check if the agent port is open:
netstat -tulpn | grep 6556
Server
On the system where the Nagios installation is running, install the check-mk-server package.
Adapt the check_mk configuration found at:
vim /etc/check_mk/main.mk
Insert the hosts you want to monitor.
Make an inventory of the hosts by running the following command:
su nagios -c "check_mk -I"
Check_mk will now automatically retrieve the possible checks for the hosts! Awesome! 😉
Write out the configuration by running the following:
su nagios -c "check_mk -O"
And restart Nagios. Voilá!
If you want nice visualizations of your data, then you also have to install the pnp4nagios package.