Distributed SNMP monitoring.

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Sir,

I am writing with a preliminary reply to this and hope that the 
authorites will correct it.

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 09:59:41PM -0500, Terry Baranski wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> Hoping I can get some thoughts on this from those experienced with
> Nagios.
> 
> I'm looking to deploy a network monitoring solution primarily to monitor
> host resources such as disk space, processor usage, and so forth via
> SNMP, and also to receive SNMP traps and notify accordingly.  The hosts
> are Open/FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, and Windows.  I'm in need of a
> solution that supports tiering -- I need an external server to monitor
> exernal devices and an internal server to monitor internal devices, with
> the external server pumping its data to the internal server, making the
> internal server the central/master server.
> 
> I first looked an OpenNMS, but it doesn't have tier support yet.  Then I
> ran across Nagios, which does seem to have tier support, but also seems
> to be geared more towards up/down monitoring than SNMP monitoring.
> 

Yes, but not only up/down; more whether or not services are working
regardless of whether the host is up.

You should also have a look at

1 (either the copy in the docs that comes with Nagios/Netsaint) or
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/int-snmptrap.html

This outlines the SNMP trap architecture for Nagios/Netsaint.

This seems to me to be tiered in the sense that you can have any number of trap collectors 
that use NCSA to send the decoded trap to a NCSA daemon on a Nagios 
manager that submits them to Nagios as a passive service check result.

(scalability is limited only by the capacity of the Nagios manager to 
read passive service check results from the command queue.

Alternatively, Nagios supports multiple tiers of managers with 
distributed monitoring. See 
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/distributed.html
)

2 There is also a third party piece of software called SNMPTT by Alex 
Burger on SourceForge.

SNMPTT eliminates or substantially reduces the maintenance cost of 
supporting traps compared with the approach above by replacing the trap 
handler(s) by SNMPTT - something that is a lot easier to live with than 
a whole bunch of trap handlers.

SNMPTT is known to work with Netsaint and therefore Nagios.

You can see some of Mr Burgers remarks about using it with Netsaint in 
the Netsaint users archive (this month).
 

> So, I'm wondering what those who have used Nagios think of its
> appropriateness (or lack thereof) for what I'm trying to accomplish.
> From the documentation I've read so far, it appears to me that tiered
> host resource monitoring is possible with the NRPE daemon running on
> each monitored host.  Is this accurate?  If so, does this daemon work on
> Open/FreeBSD?  These OS's represent the majority of our hosts.
> 

NRPE is another means of distributing monitoring. Since NRPE is a means 
of having a service check plugin run on another host (returning the 
results to the central manager) it seems less suitable to your situation  
- if it's traps you want - than NCSA.

I would be very suprised if NRPE __doesn't__ run on FreeBSD. In my 
experience Nagios only uses standard C or system call functions.

I have only used Nagios with a handful of traps in a medium size network 
(and on FreeBSD also) but it seems quite adequate and able to scale.

> Any help/advice on this will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Terry
> 
>

HTH, 

Yours sincerely.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.


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