I have just published my first book with Packt Publishing, the Nagios Core Administration Cookbook. It’s available as both an ebook and a paperback.

It’s in cookbook style, with some 360 pages of material in eleven chapters on making Nagios Core work as the centerpiece of network monitoring for busy systems administrators, including discussions on SNMP monitoring, passive checks, distributed and redundant monitoring, intelligent notification based on network structure and function, integrating with other tools like MRTG and RRDtool, and a few of the more essential extensions to the monitoring system.

The target audience is systems administrators who might know enough about Nagios Core to set it up to send PING requests to a few hosts and to email them, or perhaps check a few sites are working with check_http, but that haven’t really done much else with the system and are looking for some recipes for expanding and refining its monitoring behavior to suit their network. For those less familiar with Nagios Core the first couple of chapters recap the very basics of hosts, services, and commands. The website includes a pretty thorough overview of the contents, if this sounds like something in which you might be interested.

For promotional purposes, my publisher will allow me to give away two ebook or print copies of the book to readers of the blog, as long as you have a mailing address in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Europe. To win one, email me at tom@sanctum.geek.nz with a paragraph or two on why you think you should get a copy. I’ll send one copy to the person with the most compelling reasoning for why they deserve one, and the other to the person who tells me the funniest or most horrifying story about server monitoring gone wrong. It would be great if you’d review the book for me and my publisher after you receive a copy.

I’m very pleased to have it all finished, as it’ll enable me to resume posting more frequently on this blog. I’ve got a couple of Nagios-related posts coming up to supplement some of the content in the book for interested readers.