Best Practises for a *NIX environment over multiple WAN's

[David Jacobson]

Hi There,

We monitor a large amount of services for all our customers.  We do not have
the luxury of all the networks being on the same WAN/LAN infrastructure.

A lot of our servers have public IP¹s and a lot do not.

Typically, we have been monitoring the *NIX servers using a combination of
active and passive (active where we can, passive where the server does not
have a public IP)

What the above creates, is quite a mess and a difficult process to try and
explain to all our support agents on how to monitor our customer servers,
due to all differences.

We are now redoing our monitoring from scratch (using Groundwork) - in an
ideal world each server would be accessible via an active check and we could
ensure that 99% of all monitoring changes are doing via the Groundwork
interface (assuming we run NRPE on each server and have external arguments
accepted) - what¹s great about this, the junior support engineers could
easily make changes via an interface.

However, as discussed not all servers are accessible directly, so I¹m
considering just doing an all passive approach to simplify the process ­ to
install nagios on every server which submits its active checks back via
NSCA.  The thing I hate about this, is the fact that we have to log on to
every server to make a monitoring change, which is what I was trying to
avoid.

I guess we could make the passive approach a bit better, by making use of
something like puppet and version control so we don¹t really have to log on
to the servers...

Before I start this whole project, I would like to know if anyone has any
ideas on the ³Best way² to do this, any advise would be appreciated.  At the
moment, I¹m steering towards passive for everything and version control.

My main goal here is monitoring that works, that is simple to modify moving
forward. (KISS methodology)

-- 
Regards,

David Jacobson
Technical Director
SYNAQ (Pty) Ltd

Tel:    011 262 3628
Direct: 011 262 3626
Fax:    086 637 8868
Cell:   083 235 0760
Mail:   davidj at synaq.com
Web:    http://www.synaq.com

Key Fingerprint
8246 FCE1 3C22 7EFB E61B  18DF 6E8B 65E8 BD50 78A1

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.monitoring-lists.org/archive/users/attachments/20081023/595a0e9f/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null