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Robin Porter,

Open Source Practice Lead

A24

About The Speaker

I got into Nagios back in 2006 when I was working as a Desktop Support Expert for the University of Missouri Library System. We were managing about 200 public workstations, and our monitoring solution at the time was… well, walking around and checking them manually—pure sneakernet. That got old fast, so I started searching for a better way, stumbled onto Nagios, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Modernizing Monitoring — Scaling Nagios through Automation, AI, and Configuration as Code

Monitoring often suffers from ‘success sprawl.’ As organizations grow, acquire new entities, or scale their infrastructure, monitoring configurations frequently become messy, insecure, and difficult to manage. This session provides a practical roadmap for transforming chaotic, legacy environments into lean, automated, and future-proof Nagios powerhouses.

Drawing on two recent large-scale professional services engagements, we will demonstrate how to transition from manual intervention to a programmatic lifecycle for your monitoring infrastructure. Key highlights of this session include:

-> Case Study 1: The Secure, Programmatic Rollout How a major UK public transport operator replaced manual configuration with a robust “Configuration as Code” approach. We will demonstrate how we utilized Ansible to build a secure, scalable framework that allows for rapid, repeatable deployments across a complex, distributed network.

-> Case Study 2: From Legacy Mess to Elegant XI We detail the journey of a global insurer migrating from legacy RHEL4-based Nagios to the latest version of Nagios XI. We discuss the critical discovery phase, how to untangle complex, undocumented legacy configurations, and how we used AI to develop a future-state roadmap that drastically reduced technical debt.

Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to improve the manageability of their Nagios environments, increase the security of their configuration, and ensure their monitoring infrastructure can scale with their business.

We will conclude with a brief look at how A24’s professional services can be applied to your specific Nagios challenges. including:

-> Improve configuration, security, performance, ensure rapid issue resolution, and build in-house capability so your teams can confidently manage and scale your monitoring infrastructure in line with evolving business needs.

-> Leveraging A24 Nagios health check assessments, 24×7 support, and comprehensive training to maximize your investment in Nagios.

Behind the Session Title

I’ve done a ton of development with Nagios and Nagios XI—NRDP, plugins, notification handlers, Mod-Gearman—you name it. One thing I’ve always wanted to do was containerize Nagios in a clean, repeatable way. During the pandemic, I dove deep into LXD, and the result was running a high-availability Nagios XI setup inside LXD system containers on Ubuntu. 

Now that CentOS is basically gone, Ubuntu is becoming the go-to platform for Nagios XI deployments. I think LXD adds even more value to that, especially for developers and testers. So in my talk, I’ll walk through how to build a containerized Nagios XI development environment using Ubuntu. 

What I Hope You Learn

Guests will learn how to:
  • Use the LXD hypervisor on an Ubuntu based server.
  • Create a Lan Network integration to pull a local ip with container.
  • Create a new system container running Ubuntu.
  • Install and run NagiosXI on the container.

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