Nagios is traditionally treated as a network monitoring tool, completely indispensable to the System/Network Administrator. But Nagios is a really powerful tool that is not being fully utilized. In this session we will learn how to extend Nagios to use its power and capabilities to monitor not just network and machines but also applications.

There are a lot of reasons to monitor a web application, not just to know when it breaks and fix it immediately. We can also learn what breaks the most, usage patterns, where the bottlenecks lie, and increase performance of the application. By monitoring applications we catch common problems and specific issues, and developers are freed up to spend time on more interesting avenues.

This talk will take a fresh look at monitoring web applications; review Nagios, its hidden capabilities, and how it helps not only system administrators but also developers; and take an example of Yahoo! news and show how using Nagios has helped various Yahoo! web applications.