Nagios, like linux, is a very powerful program. The only problem with 'powerful' programs, is they take a lot of dedication to setup the way you want them, but once they are, you don't have to touch it for a very long time.

Even Nagios says in it's documentation the following statement to beginners:
"Relax - its going to take some time. Don't expect to be able to compile Nagios and start it up right off the bat. Its not that easy. In fact, its pretty difficult. If you don't want to spend time learning how things work and getting things running smoothly, don't bother using this software. Instead, pay someone to monitor your network for you or hire someone to install Nagios for you. :-)"

I would advise browsing their documentation over at http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/toc.html

This will help you with the basic, and in-depth configuration of the program.

Hello,

Actually i do not know what stage you are but nagios is the right choice for monitoring. Especially you do not want to pay thousands of dollars to other softwares. And you can do whatever with nagios.

We use Nagios+Opsview to monitor our systems. now there are about 400 server and services over 2 thousands that we actively monitor!

I think it is not diffucult to install and configure nagios. But i don't know about Gentoo Linux! We use Centos Linux.

That's really great to use open sourse software Centos+nagios+opsview+mysql, ...

And very informative to work with open source software. I learn a lot.

if you want me to help you, i will try to

Of course i am not expert on this systems but i am trying to experince and learn much!

Anyway,

Goodbye