What Is NEMS
NEMS, short for Nagios Enterprise Monitoring Server, is a modern pre-configured, customized and ready-to-deploy Nagios Core image designed to run on the Raspberry Pi 3 micro computer. At its core it is a lightweight Debian Stretch deployment optimized for performance, reliability and ease of use.
NEMS is free to download, deploy, and use. Its development however is supported by its community of users. Please consider contributing if you can.
The Vision
The goal with NEMS is to provide a free, full-featured, up to date drop in Nagios Enterprise Monitoring Server for Raspberry Pi 3. It has all the bells and whistles while being optimized for solid stability and fast performance.
The original NEMS release was based (with big thanks to Ryan Siegel) on NagiosPi, with many of the settings reflective of the NagiosPi Wheezy distro (which is now obsolete).
Here is what Ryan Siegel (the creator of NagiosPi) has to say about NEMS: “I’d love to upgrade NagiosPi, but i don’t have ability to make a GUI that can beat that of NEMS. I strongly feel that it has always been a necessary addition to NagiosPi and NEMS was able to deliver what is essentially an updated and improved version of NagiosPi. No reason not to start using NEMS for the time being. Nice work Robbie!” [source]
NEMS has since become a popular drop-in Nagios distro for Raspberry Pi, with a major release twice per year.
What Is Nagios Core?
Nagios® Core™ is an Open Source system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better.
Some of the many features of Nagios Core include:
- Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
- Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks
- Parallelized service checks
- Ability to define network host hierarchy using “parent” hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
- Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method)
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
- Automatic log file rotation
- Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
- Optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
