OMD – The Open Monitoring Distribution based on Nagios

OMD is NOT yet another linux distribution! OMD stands for nothing else than open monitoring distribution.

The OMD is package based on Nagios and a collection of Nagios plugins/addons which are bundled together to give a quick start to Nagios & Co. The difference to other tries to set-up such a project is that this approach is completely open – no real limits. This will be the next big step in evolution of Nagios!

You are interested? Take a look at the full article…

So why OMD and what is it?

For a long time you only had two choices of installing Nagios: compiling Nagios and the other neccessary packages from source by yourself. Or use the precompiled packages from your linux distribution.

Both of these choices have their goods and bads. With the first one you have to learn many lessons and will spend a lot of time before you get up you Nagios with all the addons you need/want to use.
The second option has the problem that most of the packages from your linux distribution are way too old. Additionally not many Nagios addons you probably want to use have been packed for you distribution.

This is where OMD is coming up now: OMD bundles more current software versions of Nagios, Nagios addons and Nagios plugins together and distributes them as one package of stable components which are well integrated and proven as a good combination.

This was one try to explain what OMD is in short. But there are much more details and important features you have to know about! Don’t stop reading now…

Seems not very special – give me some details!

Here are some of the key features:

• more than one instance per host: omd supports multiple but separated Nagios instances on the same machine, i.e. for one production usage and one test environment.
• separate omd user per instance: each instance has its own user.
• binary packages for most current linux distributions: We ensure that OMD is built as native package for the most important linux distributions. Installing Nagios is dead simple now!
• script based tarball building: if you decide to compile omd for yourself, you get a single tarball with all neccessary paths and binaries. Installing this tarball on hosts is as simple as extracting a common tar file.
• simple creation of new sites: omd create mysite create the site and omd start starts all stuff.
• supporting different omd version at the same time: you can install different versions in parallel, i.e. running your production instance with the last hard rock version and using the most current version in your test environment. There is an omd upgrade available, but at this time don’t rely on it, it is experimental!
• simple creation of new sites: omd create mysite create the site and omd start starts all stuff.
• plattform independent paths: omd installs to /opt/omd on all plattforms. If you don’t like this, you can symlink omd to every location you want.
• simple updates: OMD is released as it’s own version. An OMD version includes a lot of addons of different versions. Once another OMD version is released it is easy to add a second version to your installation and the upgrade your instances one by one to the new OMD version.
• best practices included: We have been using Nagios over years in many different installations and have worked out a lot of best-practices over the time. For example we create a ramdisk for all the data which is accessed often and can be deleted during reboot.

Sounds cool, eh? Try it!

Which linux distribution is the one of you choice? Debian? Ubuntu? CentOS? SLES?

No problem … we got binary packages for these packages – but only for the current versions. Just install the matching one, execute omd create <mysite> and finally run omd start <mysite>. Then open you browser and browse to http://<your-nagios-host>/<mysite>/ and check out your brand new full running Nagios + choosen Addons!

Just give it a try! You never got a Nagios installation including PNP4Nagios, Check_MK, NagVis, MKLivestatus, Multisite, DokuWiki and so on faster up and running! Now you have the time to care about the real problems, like thinking about what and how to monitor things!

And the best is: You still have all choices. You want to use another grapher? No problem. Install it! You don’t want to use a DokuWiki? Okey, let it be. What? You don’t want to have the classic Nagios CGIs as your webinterface? Mhm, okay – what about Multisite? I tell you … only three commands to success:

omd stop <yoursite>
omd config <yoursite>
# browse to the webinterfaces menu, 
# choose check_mk and quit the config dialogs
omd start <yoursite>

Now you see the Multisite GUI when accessing the root URL of your site.

It is so easy to handle – you will love it.

OMD has been initiated by a group of enthusiastic Nagios users and addon developers which have been working with Nagios for many years. We decided to build OMD as the next step to make Nagios even better and stronger!