monitoring and alerting software ????
Mike Woods
Mike at the-rubber-chicken-network.co.uk
Sat May 14 04:43:42 PDT 2005
Warren Block wrote:
> On Thu, 12 May 2005, Duane Winner wrote:
>
>> Does anybody have recommendations for a good solution to alert me
>> while I am not at work if something goes wrong with my
>> infrastucture/network/servers?
>> In other words, if I am at home, I need to be alerted if one of my
>> FreeBSD servers go down, but also if the router, firewall or switches
>> go haywire.
>
>
> Here's something I wrote recently on setting up Nagios on FreeBSD:
>
> http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/nagios.pdf
Nagios is a good choice indeed, i've recently implemented a monitoring
system for our rack at redbus using Nagios and i'm rather impressed with
how well it all works!
I've picked up a couple of "tricks" while doing this, the first one is
simply to make very good use of service templates, most of the services
we monitor in our rack are websites (using check_http) so that becomes a
somewhat repeating entry in the config, to minimize this i have a
template defined for website checks containing all of the static values
which looks an awful lot like this
define service{
use generic-service
name website-service
is_volatile 0
check_period 24x7
max_check_attempts 5
normal_check_interval 1
retry_check_interval 1
contact_groups admins
notification_interval 240
notification_period 24x7
notification_options w,u,c,r
register 0
}
since the check command will be different for each site since the site
address to query is included that gets specified in the site description
resulting in an entry that looks a lot like this
define service{
use website-service
host_name <ServerName>
service_description <ServiceName> (I use sitename)
check_command check_site!http://<SiteName>
}
which greatly reduces the size of my config files and makes them a whole
lot easier to maintain!
The other trick i've picked up is split all my host definitions into
individual files for each host then add an entry for them in the main
Nagios config (much as i do with vhosts in apache), again this makes it
far easier to maintain and has the bonus that removing a host is simply
a matter of commenting out/deleting a line in the master config file.
Last two things, firstly, nagios -v is your friend, it will give you
concise and quite useful information on any errors in your config files
and saves you loosing the system because of a typo, secondly, for
remote checks nrpe is a godsend, it can be used to allow Nagios to check
pretty much any local information on a remote machine and is quite easy
to configure, for example I have it monitoring the capacity of the /usr
mount our Solars machine (along with a few other bits).
Hope that's helpful to someone :)
---------------------
Mike Woods
Systems Administrator
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