Distributed SNMP monitoring.

[Subhendu Ghosh]

I would like to see Nagios extend into a performance tracking arena and 
the separation that Ethan has planned for the event deamon will allow 
that.

The things to decide are whether to build a new RRD interface or to use an 
existing on - and what is the primary focus and the secondary result.

I like Cricket, but Cricket is a resource hog as well for 
large configurations.  The sub-trees mechanism allows 
better system load management, but you are still launching perl from cron.

I prefer Nagios' primary focus on fault detection and a secondary result 
of historical data gathering.

If Nagios builds RRD data support:

The RRD data storage layout is also an issue to be discussed. - Do we lay 
out the data in a flat directory (probably not for scaling) or create some 
hierarchy of directory based on host/parent relationship

If integrating: 
Decide on which existing front-end, Figure out if we can just use the 
grapher functionality there and have the raw data fed from the nagios 
plugins.. (one data read from source)

-sg


On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Jamie wrote:

> All great comments Jim (as always).
> 
> <my2cents>
> 
> Noting your last paragraph:
> 
> It seems to me to be a common issue - i.e integrating time-series
> data/trending (snmp) info with "point" info & threshold detection that
> nagios provides. Superficially it's easy - just do cool things with side
> menu.....
> 
> I originally used NRG because it auto-conf'ed everything, so was easy to
> use. The downside is it was not so flexible. So, we moved over to
> Cricket+Smokeping. Seems all good (so far).
> 
> But anyway, on to my point:
> 
> It's wouldn't surprise me that loadsa people want to do the same
> Nagios+RRD&Front-End combo (but with no fries).
> - APAN seems pretty good but when one has a plethora of RRD front-ends out
> there - why would you create another one -especially when people have an
> investment in the rrd stored data of the existing system? (no offense
> fredrik).
> - IMHO Cacti seems to be overkill. But I could be wrong.
> 
> So, can I see a show of hands as to what people's preferences are for an RRD
> "partner tool" for Nagios? Maybe we could all work together on making
> integration between the two really slick...
> 
> Architecturally my preference is to let the RRD tools do the data
> acquisition, and let nagios pull from the (probable) local RRD file....What
> are people's thoughts on that?
> 
> Ethan, Subhendu etc - Do you see the extension of Nagios from a
> monitoring/reporting tool to that plus performance analysis as a viable
> future development path?
> 
> </my2cents>
> 
> jamie
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Carroll, Jim P [Contractor]" <jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com>
> To: "'Terry Baranski'" <terry at eurocompton.net>;
> <nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 7:21 AM
> Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] Distributed SNMP monitoring.
> 
> 
> > 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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