Implementing within an IT group

[Rhugga]

Patrick Stockton wrote:

> Has anybody written or come across a "Best Practices" guide for 
> implementing Nagios within an IT group?
>
> Our team is still small (six) but growing.  Most of the team has never 
> used any sort of network monitoring software and communication between 
> us is still fairly poor.  I set up Nagios to help eliminate some of 
> the communication problems within our group.
>
> Before I set out and write a guide on how to use this within an IT 
> group I was hoping there were some resources out there that other 
> people had used.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Patrick


Well, it would be something to the effect of :

1) Determine each admin's duty schedule and when they desire to receive 
notifications and the type of notifcations, etc...
2) Define contact groups for different things. I created the following 
groups, we are also a small team 4 peopls maintaining 2 250-node linux 
cluster, 20+ large sun servers, 15+ Windows servers and 100 users (all 
scientists with 2-3 desktops per person): mycompany-unix, mycompany-win, 
mycompany-network, and mycompany-cluster. This divides the monitored 
systems into 4 distinct categories.
3) Define your contacts and all there desired alerts and etc...
4) Define your hosts and monitored services according to your business 
needs.

There is no vanilla way to config nagios from a logistical standpoint, 
since every site will have different needs and different SLA's, etc.... 
I use to nagios to overcome the fact that we have 4 people doing what a 
team of 10 should be doing. (Note that this 4 person team does 
_everything_, all oracle DBA's tasks, all network engineering tasks, 
etc...) Oh yea, I also have to do the budgeting, as well. Oh how I love 
the current economy. As a plus I just convinced my company to no longer 
outsource software development to any company that employs people 
overseas. Part of the new growing effort to "Buy American, Support American"

I just nuked my old nagios system and am building a complete new system 
using 1.2. (actually a few of us started to write our own enterprise 
management platform but we got to a point where we needed funding to 
take our project to the next level and funding is hard to get these 
days, you basically already have to be profitable to get VC)

Hope this help,
Rhugga


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