Instant Nagios Starter Review

I was recently asked to review “Instant Nagios Starter” by the people over at Packt Publishing.

This book is the first book I have read in Packt’s “Instant” series, which is publicised as “Learn in an instant. Short; Fast; Focused”. The book is certainly short; it is only 46 pages long and by the time you get to the start of Chapter 1 you are already 17% of the way through the title! The book is available in e-book format only (epub, mobi and pdf versions are all available). The price too is very reasonable; coming in at under £5 including VAT!

The book is written by Michael Guthrie who comes with some very impressive Nagios credentials! Have a read of his profile over at Packt to see what I mean.

The book has a nice clear format breaking itself down into the following sections:

  1. So what is Nagios?
  2. Installation
  3. Quick Start
  4. Top 5 features you need to know about
  5. People and places you should get to know

On completing the third section, you should be at a point to be able to start configuring Nagios to monitor your individual network environment.

The fourth section does indeed contain some very useful features and good links to the core documentation over at Nagios’ main site. I found myself picking up a few things here which I had previously missed and even learning about some add-ons to the project which I had not come across before.

The final section of the book gives some very useful links to resources and support across the Internet for Nagios and some of these are certainly going to become reading material for me.

This is a great book for those new to Nagios or wanting to learn what the software can do for them. This book does exactly as the slogan suggests; facilitating short, fast, focused learning in an engaging and accessible style.

If you want a more in-depth knowledge you will need to read elsewhere; but this book does provide you with the sources you would need for further research. If you buy this book and want to learn more about Nagios, I would also recommend one of Packt’s other titles on Nagios: “Learning Nagios 3.0

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