Nagios Archives - IT Jungle

Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool

March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.

Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be …
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Shield Revs HA Software for IBM i

September 25, 2024 Alex Woodie

Companies protecting their IBM i servers with Shield Advanced Solutions’ HA4i will enjoy several new capabilities when they upgrade to the latest release, including faster save while active processing, improved object compression, and new Nagios monitoring functions, among other enhancements.

Shield Advanced Solutions has been developing and selling an IBM i high availability solution since 2007, when it rolled out Receiver Apply Program/400 (RAP/400), which it dubbed “DR for the masses.” In 2010, the Toronto-area company overhauled that product and debuted its replacement, HA4i at version 6.1. Over the ensuing years, Shield steadily added new features to the …
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Shield Adds HMC, Security PTFs to Nagios Monitoring Solution

March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

If you’d like to know what’s going on with your Hardware Management Console (HMC), you can do so through the updated Nagios offering from Shield Advanced Solutions. Version 2.1 of the company’s bundled AAG and NG4i offering also will automatically notify you when IBM has submitted security PTFs for the operating system or licensed products, and even download them for you.

After initially trying to use IBM’s open source Nagios software to monitor their customers’ high availability software environments, the folks at Shield Advanced Solutions took it upon themselves to develop their own Nagios distribution for the IBM i server, …
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Everybody Needs Monitoring On The IBM i

October 18, 2023 Chris Hird

If you are running a software business, you can never go wrong by listening to the customer and then providing what they want.

Our journey into being an adjunct for the open source Nagios system monitoring tool began when we had a client that wanted to monitor multiple LPAR instances being backed up by our high availability software, HA4i, from a single pane of glass. At the time, we had a PHP interface for our HA4i tool, and we really did not want to rewrite all of that just to be able to give this customer that single pane …
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Shield Builds on Success with Nagios for IBM i

September 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

Traditional system monitoring tools on IBM i are valuable, but they have one big downside: They often require an operator to sit there and stare at the screen to detect when things go wrong. “That gets old very quickly,” says Chris Hird, the Shield Advanced Solutions director who found an alternative approach in Nagios.

Nagios is unique among monitoring tools – at least in the IBM i world – in that it actively runs checks for a variety of systems on monitored machines on a continuous basis. It is constantly pinging target server (and network and storage devices) to check …
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Shield Debuts Nagios Monitoring Solution for IBM i

December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

Shield Advanced Solutions last week rolled out a new system monitoring solution based on open-source Nagios technology that gives customers quick insight into the state of their IBM i server. Dubbed AAG, for At A Glance, the product currently monitor 65 IBM i parameters, and can be used with existing Nagios deployments running on Linux or deployed in a standalone manner with an included Linux runtime.

Nagios is a free open-source software project that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, networking devices, applications, and other IT gear. The software was originally developed in 2002 to monitor Linux systems, and over …
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Nagios Solidifies Role in IBM i Monitoring

December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that are looking for monitoring solutions would do well to add Nagios to their short list. The open source software has been embraced by IBM i shops, and thanks to a new SQL connector added by IBM with the latest technology refreshes and plans for monitoring the HMC, Nagios connectivity to IBM i is on the upswing.

Nagios Core is a free, open source software project that’s been adopted by thousands of customers around the world to monitor servers, storage, software, services, networking gear, and anything else that can be connected to the network. The software is …
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Latest TRs For IBM i Now Available

November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM last week delivered the latest IBM i operating system Technology Refreshes, giving good IBM i boys and girls around the world early Christmas presents in areas like programing, operations, database, and security. Here’s a quick recap of the new stuff in IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7.

There were several general enhancements with IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7. For starters, administrators gained more control over resources available to the Integrated Web Server (the one powered by Apache) with the new capability to install it the Web server in a user-specified sub-system. Admins also get new functions …
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Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …
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Is Nagios The Future Of Monitoring For IBM i?

November 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

For decades, technology professionals turned to established frameworks from IBM Tivoli, CA, Hewlett Packard, and BMC (“The Big Four”) to monitor their hardware and software stacks. But the open source world has caught up with those closed monitoring environments, and a project dubbed Nagios is poised to be the go-to platform for IT monitoring, including on IBM i.

Nagios, if you are not familiar, is a free and open source software product that provides monitoring and alerting for servers, network gear, applications, and the array of services that organizations increasingly rely on. The software –backed by the obligatory recursive acronym …
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