How to Install and Configure Nagios on CentOS 7

By 

Dejan Panovski
•

Published on

•

6 min read

Install and Configure Nagios on CentOS

Nagios is one of the most popular open-source monitoring systems. Nagios keeps an inventory of your entire IT infrastructure and ensures your networks, servers, applications, services, and processes are up and running. In case of failure or suboptimal performance Nagios will send notification alerts via various methods.

This tutorial describes how to install and configure Nagios Core on a CentOS 7 server.

Prerequisites

Before continuing with this tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges .

Disable SELinux or set in permissive mode as instructed here .

Update your CentOS system and install Apache , PHP and all the packages necessary to download and compile the Nagios main application and Nagios plugins:

Terminal
sudo yum update
sudo yum install httpd php php-cli gcc glibc glibc-common gd gd-devel net-snmp openssl-devel wget
sudo yum install make gettext autoconf net-snmp-utils epel-release perl-Net-SNMP postfix unzip automake

Installing Nagios on CentOS

Perform the following steps to install the latest version of Nagios Core from source.

1. Downloading Nagios

We’ll download Nagios source in the /usr/src directory which is the common location to place source files.

Navigate to the directory with:

Terminal
cd /usr/src/

Download the latest version of Nagios from the project Github repository using the following wget command :

Terminal
sudo wget https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/nagioscore/archive/nagios-4.4.2.tar.gz

Once the download is complete extract the tar file with:

Terminal
sudo tar zxf nagios-*.tar.gz

Before continuing with the next steps, make sure you change to the Nagios source directory by typing:

Terminal
cd nagioscore-nagios-*/

2. Compiling Nagios

To start the build process run the configure script which will perform a number of checks to make sure all of the dependencies on your system are present:

Terminal
sudo ./configure

Upon successful completion, the following message will be printed on your screen:

output
*** Configuration summary for nagios 4.4.2 2018-08-16 ***:

 General Options:
 -------------------------
        Nagios executable:  nagios
        Nagios user/group:  nagios,nagios
       Command user/group:  nagios,nagios
             Event Broker:  yes
        Install ${prefix}:  /usr/local/nagios
    Install ${includedir}:  /usr/local/nagios/include/nagios
                Lock file:  /run/nagios.lock
   Check result directory:  /usr/local/nagios/var/spool/checkresults
           Init directory:  /lib/systemd/system
  Apache conf.d directory:  /etc/httpd/conf.d
             Mail program:  /sbin/sendmail
                  Host OS:  linux-gnu
          IOBroker Method:  epoll

 Web Interface Options:
 ------------------------
                 HTML URL:  http://localhost/nagios/
                  CGI URL:  http://localhost/nagios/cgi-bin/
 Traceroute (used by WAP):  /bin/traceroute


Review the options above for accuracy.  If they look okay,
type 'make all' to compile the main program and CGIs.

Start the compilation process using the make command:

Terminal
sudo make all

The compilation may take some time, depending on your system. Once the build process is completed, the following message will be printed on your screen:

output
....
*** Compile finished ***
...
For more information on obtaining support for Nagios, visit:

       https://support.nagios.com

*************************************************************

Enjoy.

3. Creating Nagios User And Group

Create a new system nagios user and group by issuing:

Terminal
sudo make install-groups-users

The output will look something like below:

output
groupadd -r nagios
useradd -g nagios nagios

Add the Apache apache user to the nagios group:

Terminal
sudo usermod -a -G nagios apache

4. Installing Nagios Binaries

Run the following command to install Nagios binary files, CGIs, and HTML files:

Terminal
sudo make install

You should see the following output:

output
...
*** Main program, CGIs and HTML files installed ***
...

5. Creating External Command Directory

Nagios can process commands from external applications. Create the external command directory and set the proper permissions by typing:

Terminal
sudo make install-commandmode
output
*** External command directory configured ***

6. Install Nagios Configuration Files

Install the sample Nagios configuration files with:

Terminal
sudo make install-config
output
...
*** Config files installed ***

Remember, these are *SAMPLE* config files.  You'll need to read
the documentation for more information on how to actually define
services, hosts, etc. to fit your particular needs.

7. Install Apache Configuration Files

Run the command below to install the Apache web server configuration files:

Terminal
sudo make install-webconf
output
...
*** Nagios/Apache conf file installed ***

Restart the web server:

Terminal
sudo systemctl restart httpd

8. Creating Systemd Unit File

The following command installs a systemd unit file and also configure the nagios service to start on boot.

Terminal
sudo make install-daemoninit
output
...
*** Init script installed ***

9. Creating User Account

To be able to access the Nagios web interface wel’ll create an admin user called nagiosadmin

Run the following htpasswd command to create a user called nagiosadmin

Terminal
sudo htpasswd -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin

You will be prompted to enter and confirm the user’s password.

output
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user nagiosadmin

Restart the Apache service for changes to take effect:

Terminal
sudo systemctl restart httpd

Configure the Apache service to start on boot.

Terminal
sudo systemctl enable httpd

10. Configuring Firewall

The firewall will secure your server against unwanted traffic.

If you don’t have a firewall configured on your server, you can check our guide about how to setup a firewall with firewalld on centos

Open the Apache ports by running the following commands:

Terminal
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=http
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=https
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Installing Nagios Plugins

Switch back to the /usr/src directory:

Terminal
cd /usr/src/

Download the latest version of the Nagios Plugins from the project Github repository :

Terminal
sudo wget -O nagios-plugins.tar.gz https://github.com/nagios-plugins/nagios-plugins/archive/release-2.2.1.tar.gz

When the download is complete extract the tar file:

Terminal
sudo tar zxf nagios-plugins.tar.gz

Change to the plugins source directory:

Terminal
cd nagios-plugins-release-2.2.1

Run the following commands one by one to compile and install the Nagios plugins:

Terminal
sudo ./tools/setup
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

Starting Nagios

Now that both Nagios and its plugins are installed, start the Nagios service with:

Terminal
sudo systemctl start nagios

To verify that Nagios is running, check the service status with the following command:

Terminal
sudo systemctl status nagios

The output should look something like below indicating that Nagios service is active and running.

output
 nagios.service - Nagios Core 4.4.2
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nagios.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2018-12-08 14:33:35 UTC; 3s ago
     Docs: https://www.nagios.org/documentation
  Process: 22217 ExecStart=/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -d /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 22216 ExecStartPre=/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 22219 (nagios)
   CGroup: /system.slice/nagios.service

Accessing the Nagios Web Interface

To access the Nagios web interface open your favorite browser and type your server’s domain name or public IP address followed by /nagios:

url
http(s)://your_domain_or_ip_address/nagios

Enter the nagiosadmin user login credentials and you will be redirected to the default Nagios home page as shown on the image below:

Install Nagios on CentOS

Conclusion

You have successfully installed the latest Nagios version from source on your CentOS system.

You should now check the Nagios Documentation and learn more about how to configure and use Nagios.

If you hit a problem or have feedback, leave a comment below.

Tags

monitoring centos

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About the authors

Dejan Panovski

Dejan Panovski

Dejan Panovski is the founder of Linuxize, an RHCSA-certified Linux system administrator and DevOps engineer based in Skopje, Macedonia. Author of 800+ Linux tutorials with 20+ years of experience turning complex Linux tasks into clear, reliable guides.

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