Distributed SNMP monitoring.

[Frater, Greg J]

I am working on this issue for our network as we speak (type).  We set out
to add alerting, monitoring, and trending functionality.  We chose Nagios
(great product) for alerting and monitoring.  We intended to use MRTG for
trending and still might, though, currently I am looking at apan (and
others) because it would be great to be able to leverage the Nagios web
front end and the rich set of service checks it provides for data collection
to be able to provide the trending or monitoring over time.  

I am new to this whole game so I don't know that I can add to the discussion
other than to say that this is a very relevant topic for us.  And keep up
the good work, we are getting a lot of ooh's and ah's (sp?) when showing
people Nagios.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jamie [mailto:jamie.baddeley at bclnz.net]
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 9:47 PM
To: Carroll, Jim P [Contractor]; 'Terry Baranski';
nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Distributed SNMP monitoring.


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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