Distributed SNMP monitoring.

[Carroll, Jim P [Contractor]]

A few comments here.

First, OpenNMS was recently discussed on this list.  The general hubbub is
that it is a resource hog.  (I've never touched it, so take this comment for
what it's worth.)  Seems you'll need to spend some serious bucks on your
OpenNMS server if you want to even put it up for consideration.

Second, Nagios rocks.  It really does.  That's the 'warm fuzzy' comment
which I'm sure many others on this list will embrace.  Basically, any test
that you can run from a command line can be incorporated into Nagios.
Already there are many plugins which have been crafted to do some very
popular tasks.

On tiering:  I'm not exactly clear on your intent, but you can run two
Nagios servers, and have the results of one cascade over to the other with
the assistance of NSCA.  Thus, the external server will display only what
it's collected, and the internal server will display what it's collected, as
well as what the external server as sent over to it.

On down/up vs. SNMP:  Nagios provides support for SNMP via plugins (most
notably check_snmp).  If you want to handle traps, there are a couple of
approaches (TMTOWTDI in Perl-speak); one way would be to be running
snmptrapd on your Nagios server, and have a cronjob kick off every minute to
scrub the logfile, reformat the trap and stuff it into nagios.cmd (FIFO).
Another way would be to have the event get redirected via NSCA to the Nagios
host.  Yes, Nagios has down/up checks, such as, "is something listening on
port 80 on host fizzgig or not".  But some of the plugins relate to local
host metrics, such as free disk space, number of processes (with specialized
options, such as checking for zombies), free swap, etc.  In these cases, you
would more likely want to configure for green/yellow/red alerts
(OK/Warning/Critical in Nagios).  If you want to write your own script,
there are many examples (plugins) to follow.  To get the green/yellow/red
response in Nagios, you would have your script return code 0, 1 or 2
accordingly.  One point which can be confusing to Nagios newbies, is that
things like check_disk won't work on a remote host, unless you
install/execute it on the remote host.  But how to get the results to
Nagios?  Ah, that's where NRPE (or NSCA, or...) come in.

As someone else has pointed out, if you wish to chart trends, you'll want to
take a look at something like cacti (which I hope to try in the near
future).  Another contributor has created APAN (which also uses RRDTool).

I hope this gives you the needed food for thought.

jc

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Terry Baranski [mailto:terry at eurocompton.net]
> Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 9:00 PM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Distributed SNMP monitoring.
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Any help/advice on this will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Terry
> 
> 
> 
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