Monitoring

Team: Artur Ovtsinnikov, Mohanad Aly, Etienne Barrier, Meelis Hass

Group : Cyber Security Engineering (C21)

Page Created: 23 October 2016

‎Last modified: ‎23 October 2016

Introduction

This article introduces the Monitoring application called Nagios.

Monitoring

Monitoring is the process of keep tracking of system resources.

Monitoring is the process of observing and checking the progress or quality of something over a period of time; keep under systematic review. Monitoring cannot be achieved without logging. That is the reason integrated solutions combine the two processes. Monitoring is used to:

• check performance
• detect if something worth noticing happened
• prevent something to happen
• detect whether a system is under attack

The good solution: Nagios

As of today, [1] is the most popular open-source solution for monitoring computer systems before

Monitoring is made of three components:

• Apache
• PHP
• MySQL

The main advantages of Nagios are:

• Open-source
• Customized Dashboards
• Ease of Use
• Infinite Scalability
• Data in Real Time
• Network Security

Why monitor our servers

There are many reasons why a system administrator would want to monitor its server(s).

• Prevent undesired events to happen

Without monitoring, a system administrator will react to a problem only when it has already occurred. Such issue can in the worst case cause a failure of the CIA triad. It is of course wiser to anticipate such issues and solve the problem before they arise. The monitoring system sends alerts that help to identify potential sources of futures failures to avoid.

• Understand what happened in case of failure

In the event of a system failure, the monitoring system will give crucial information to determine where, when and how the problems occurred. This information makes the debugging process to be much faster and easier.

In the end, monitoring a system can be seen as an insurance policy. It costs money and time, but the money and time it saves is worth it.