Introduction

This chapter aims to provide information about the purpose of the TYPO3 extension, how it works and how a typical setup looks like.

How the extension works

The TYPO3 Nagios® extension gathers information about the TYPO3 system and provides these details for a Nagios® server to retrieve. The Nagios® server parses and analyses the data and reacts appropriately according to its configuration. Both parts (the Nagios® server and the TYPO3 extension) build a system that enables system administrators to monitor a large number of TYPO3 instances and to notify administrators about a suspicious condition of one or more TYPO3 instances.

Illustration 1

Illustration 1: Nagios server and TYPO3 instance

The Nagios® server (left) contains the Nagios® TYPO3 plugin which communicates via HTTP/HTTPS (see next section) with one or more TYPO3 servers. The other side - the TYPO3 server (right) - contains the TYPO3 Nagios® extension. The latter is subject of this manual.

A typical use case for Nagios® and this TYPO3 extension is to monitor a server farm with dozens of TYPO3 servers and to ensure the infrastructure is up-to-date and in a secure and “healthy” condition.

This documentation focuses on the TYPO3 extension predominantly. The counterpart (the Nagios® server and the check_typo3.sh plugin) is briefly described in chapter Nagios Server Plugin Configuration. Further installation and configuration instruction are available at schams.net.

Detailed Overview

Nagios® is the de-facto standard of open source network and server monitoring. It is a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve I.T. infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes. A professional hosting infrastructure includes one or more monitoring instances in order to check if the network, the servers and the services are all up and running and in working order. A Nagios® server monitors those things and notifies system administrators if a suspicious condition or a fatal error (e.g. service response too slow, server not reachable, maybe down?) occurs.

Nagios® provides a comprehensive set of checks off the shelf including PING (server alive), disk space, server load, free memory, etc. (on a server level) but also SMTP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS response, etc. (on a service/application level). Apart of those basic checks Nagios® allows system administrators to implement and configure their own checks.

The TYPO3 Nagios® extension in combination with the TYPO3 check plugin for Nagios® (check_typo3.sh) enables system administrators to gather information from a TYPO3 site and to react if the web instance reports a specific condition. In a practical sense this means system managers can be warned if a TYPO3 server runs with a specific (e.g. outdated) version of TYPO3 (or PHP) or TYPO3’s development application context is enabled on a production system.

The Nagios® server is optimized for running on a Linux/UNIX server but is able to monitor all kinds of servers, services and network devices (e.g. Windows/Mac/Linux/UNIX machines, Netware servers, routers/switches, network printers and publicly available services such as HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.).

Read more about Nagios® and monitoring strategies at the following sites.

The following sub-sections provide further details and insights: