Great nagios book (2008-11-26)
Good nagios book. Usable for novice as well as experienced users.

The complex nagios environment is explained in a simple comprehensible manner. The book inspires to implemement non-standard elements.

It help you from scratch to a full blowing monitoring environment.

Best for Nagios admins who want specific details on plug-ins (2006-09-04)
I recently received review copies of Pro Nagios 2.0 (PN2) by James Turnbull and Nagios: System and Network Monitoring (NSANM) by Wolfgang Barth. I read PN2 first, then NSANM. Both are excellent books, but I expect potential readers want to know which is best for them. The following is a radical simplification, and I could honestly recommend readers buy either (or both) books. If you are completely new to Nagios and want a very well-organized introduction, I recommend PN2. If you are somewhat familiar with Nagios and want detailed descriptions of a wide variety of Nagios plug-ins, I recommend NSANM.

NSANM strengths lie in the depth of coverage of certain elements when compared to PN2. PN2 devotes 7 pages to host checks, while NSANM's Ch 7 offers 21 pages. PN2 supplies 8 pages on service checks, but NSANM's Ch 6 gives 46 pages. This level of detail can be very useful. For example, NSANM's explanation of check_squid also shows to to configure Sguid to allow access to its cache manager.

NSANM shares more information on certain background protocols like SNMP. PN2's SNMP section is about 7 pages, whereas NSANM's Ch 11 is 36 pages. NSANM demonstrates more aspects of Nagios' Web interface and the CGI programs generating pages. I thought author Wolfgang Barth made very effective use of diagrams, like the network topology explanation in Ch 4, the service checks in Ch 5, and notification in Ch 12.

NSANM includes some material not mentioned in PN2, like using Nagios with Cygwin. Sometimes the books are very complementary, as shown by PN2's discussion of NSClient++ and NSANM's overview of NSClient and NC_Net.

NSANM is lacking coverage of security, redundancy, and failover, however. PN2 does address these critical issues. Beware the some of the "chapters" in NSANM are very short -- like Ch 8 (2 pages!) and Ch 19 (barely 6 pages). I think short sections like those should have been integrated into longer chapters or moved into the appendices.

Overall, NSANM is a very good book. I believe new Nagios readers should read PN2, and strongly consider NSANM as a complementary reference volume.

2nd edition: Worldwide best coverage !! (2006-07-25)
Worldwide best coverage !!

2 years back I have read the first edition and was already impressed at that stage. Now the second edition came out with majored and updated contents, wider coverage, more details and - if you want to call it that way - built-in backwards compatibility.

Great care was taken to reflect any changes that had been done between Nagios version two and three. Whenever necessary, Barth's Nagios book points out those changes. As a fact I would say its one of the key features of this second editiion to take the reader from the second version to the third version.
This obviously includes configuration changes, migrations and testing it.

The carefully documented experience of the author and his team alone make this book well worthwhile !!

This goes from the time saving technics he describes, the config changes hints and tips, the migration scenario sample through the more advanced topics mentioned above like distributed monitoring, single sign-on environments, the embedded perl interpeter, all kind of databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sap, Oracle) mailservers ( postfix, qmail, exim, sendmail ) etc. and the list goes on and on.

The now 720p and 26 chapter strong second edition covers the advanced topics many of us have been waiting for.

Just see the below highlight feature list for the big changes of the whopping 200 page additions:

- Whats new in Nagios three (overview)
- Migration / conversion from version two to three
- Single-Sign on environments (Apache, Windows ...)
- Nagios embedded Perl Interpreter
- Distributed Monitoring
- Alternate state flapping
- Monitoring file and folder sizes
- NRPE coverage
- NSClient++ coverage
- EventDB

The book is rounded up with 8 !! Appendices and a 25p index.
I feel you get a lot of information that will save you lots of hassle down the road.

F.e if any of the ready available plugins are not working the way you want it, no problem, Mr. Barth gives you ideas how to make them work for you or even how to create your own.

The authors very accessable style make this book readable and enjoyable for system admins, developers, consultants and managers.
The 1st edition was already ahead of its marcet, but now with Mr. Barths second edition it's definitely the worls best coverage of the Nagios tool !!
Kudos to the author and his publisher team !!

(I attached the review of the 1st edition below as a comment.)