Configure hostgroups for Nagios

If you’ve been following my Nagios articles here on Ghacks (see “ Easily extend Nagios’ functionality ” and “ Quickly install Nagios on Ubuntu ” for more information) you are probably impressed with how powerful Nagios is. Well, I can happily say you haven’t seen anything yet. Nagios is amazing in it’s ability to extend and report. Of course, along with this power comes a bit of work to be done by the administrator. With Nagios there are no fancy widgets and wizards to walk you through simple configurations. Nagios requires you to get your fingers a bit dirty with the command line. One cool ability of Nagios is that it allows you to group machines into services. Say, for instance, you have a number of machines that serve as Web servers or Samba servers. Instead of having to scroll around to find them, you can group those machines together, by service, to make for much easier monitoring. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to take advantage of this nifty feature. Assumptions I am going to assume that you already have Nagios installed and working