ADMIN - Explore the new world of system administration! ADMIN is a smart, technical magazine for IT pros on heterogeneous networks. Each issue delivers technical solutions to the real-world problems you face every day. Learn the latest techniques for better:
network security
system management
troubleshooting
performance tuning
virtualization
cloud computing
on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and popular varieties of Unix.
Are your systems behaving? Is your newest workstation too busy for its memory? Stay ahead of problems on your network with the free and versatile monitoring tool known as Nagios.
If you are responsible for more than a few PCs, you may have noticed that it would be nice to monitor the status of your network automatically. In fact, you may have already implemented such a system. Why devote a cover story to Nagios? Professional admins already have their own favorite monitoring tools, and home users don’t need to bother with network monitoring. Or is there more to this? The IT world is full of commercial monitoring tools. In fact, a large portion of the show floor at a conference such as LinuxWorld is devoted to tools for monitoring and managing network resources. Many of these tools are quite effective, and we don’t discourage anyone from using a commercial solution if it is the right tool for the job. However, you really can go a long way in Linux using free products, and Nagios is an example of an extremely effective tool you don’t have to pay for. If you are thinking about purchasing a commercial solution, you need to know what you’re comparing it with. If you stop by those booths at LinuxWorld, you’ll find countless brochures, white papers, and technical documents on the commercial monitoring solutions.
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