For our October “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Nagios Core, a powerful, enterprise-class host, server, application, and network monitoring tools. Ethan Galstad, creator of Nagios Core shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): What made you start this project?
Ethan Galstad (EG): Nagios was inspired when I was working as a system admin at my college newspaper. We didn’t have any type of monitoring solution in place and got burned when the IT staff was at an offsite meeting, completely unaware the servers at the newspaper had crashed. The idea for Nagios was originally born then. Coding on Nagios proper didn’t start until a few years later when I was interested in starting a business that would offer monitoring services.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
EG: I originally only thought a dozen or so people would have an interest in Nagios. Since its first release in 1999, the popularity of Nagios has skyrocketed beyond my wildest imagination!
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
EG: Sysadmins, network admins, devops – anyone who’s technical and has a need to monitoring their infrastructure – regardless of whether that’s workstations, servers, networks, applications, or services.
SF: What core need does Nagios fulfill?
EG: The ability to know what’s going on within your system so you can focus on other tasks in your job. The last thing a busy admin wants is to be the last to know that a critical server, website, or application has crashed without their knowledge.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using Nagios?
EG: Nagios Core is a pretty technical project, so taking the time to read the manual is a must. There are numerous tutorials and videos online that provide helpful tips and best practices for new people that are looking to deploy Core in their infrastructure.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
EG: We spend quite a bit of time incorporating the community’s patches and feature requests into releases. Several years ago we launched Nagios Exchange (exchange.nagios.org) to highlight the massive development effort of the community. The site features a plethora of addons the community has developed for and around Nagios Core.
SF: Have you all found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
EG: Frequent releases is a cornerstone of Open Source development, and Nagios Core is no different. Each time we make a release we get valuable feedback and feature requests that go into future development efforts.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
EG: The first important thing would be the initial developers that joined the project many years ago. Their insight, guidance, and development efforts helped make Nagios into what it is today.
SF: What helped make that happen?
EG: Publishing the Nagios Core project on SourceForge was extremely instrumental in bringing in developers. Thanks for the awesome services you guys provide! Without a doubt! SourceForge is the place to be for Open Source projects.
SF: What is the next big thing for Nagios Core?
EG: More optimization and performance improvements. People always seem to push Nagios Core to larger and larger environments. Right now we’re working on a new feature that leverages gearman to distribute checks. In the testing we’ve done, we’ve found the performance improvements to be incredible.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
EG: We’re hoping for a release by the end of the year. It might come sooner, but we’re working on a number of other feature requests at the same time, so it’s difficult to say for sure.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
EG: Yes we do, but contributors to the development efforts are always welcome!
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for Nagios?
EG: I’d probably pick a language other than C for the main project, for the sole reason that it’s easier to find developers to join in. C is great for speed and optimized apps, but it’s got a bit of a higher learning curve than some other languages.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
EG: I think that’s it for now!