OS, Hardware, Network - Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting

Phil Regnauld regnauld at catpipe.net
Thu Jun 26 09:31:54 UTC 2008


Rev. Jeffrey Paul (sneak) writes:
> 
> 1) Is SNMP the best way to do this?  Obviously some of the data (service
> checks) will need to be collected other ways.

	SNMP, the vendor MIBs + SNMP extensions for monitoring hardware specifics
	(PSU, etc...), and something like Nagios to do the TCP/network checks.

> 2) Is there any good solution that does both logging/trending of this
> data and also notification/monitoring/alerting?  I've used both Nagios
> and Cacti in the past, and, due to the number of individual things being
> monitored (3-5 items per OS instance, 5-10 items per physical server,
> 10-50 things per network device), setting them both up independently
> seems like a huge pain.  Also, I've never really liked Nagios that much.

	Well, you could look at Zabbix, Hyperic, ZenOSS, OpenNMS and see if
	they cut it better for you, but the trick with Nagios is to use
	a DB and generate the include files automatically, then have some
	other more user friendly tools to populate the DB.  Or use templates
	extensively.
	
	Then make sure your plugins output performance data for perf.data
	monitoring, and use something like NagiosGraph
	http://nagiosgraph.wiki.sourceforge.net/ or PNP4Nagios:

	http://www.pnp4nagios.org/pnp/about#system_requirements
	http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/developer-guidelines.html#AEN203
	http://www.pnp4nagios.org/pnp/screenshots


> I recently entertained the idea of writing a CGI that output all of this
> information in a standard format (csv?), distributing and installing it, then
> collecting it periodically at a central location and doing all the
> rrd/notification myself, but then realized that this problem must've
> been solved a million times already.

	Yes :)  But check out the above links, and with a bit of planning
	and a small amount of coding/adapting existing components, it will
	work out.

> There's got to be a better way.  What do you guys use?

	We rewrote our own NMS from scratch :)

> (I'm not opposed to non-free solutions, provided they work better.)

	We sell our solution, so I'm biased, but do check out the Nagios
	route, it works well enough for small to medium, and larger installations
	with careful planning (problem with Nagios is how to make it perform
	with thousands of hosts).

	Hth,
	Phil





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