Dec/091
Nagios – Open Source Monitoring
Nagios in general
Nagios is an Open Source solution to monitor complex IT infrastructures. Nagios can be used to perform alive checks to ensure the availability of networked systems. It is also possible to use Nagios for performance and capacity analyzes.
History
Nagios has first been developed under the name Netsaint. Since 2002 the project is Named Nagios. The name comes from the words Network + Hagios.
The concept
The concept of Nagios is to serve a smart and stable core which can be easily modified and extended with a couple of addons and plugins.
Knowing this you may notice that you get at least two components with the Nagios core package. The Nagios Core and the default web frontend which uses C based CGIs.
This concept may also be an explanation why the default Nagios Plugins are stripped from the Nagios Package and served as separate project.
Splitting the single components in different projects leads in a higher flexibility. Each user can install components the components which are needed in a special setup. The big disadvantage is the amount of time which is needed to get a running and checking Nagios installation. Especially for beginners the first steps are not easy.
Dec/095
MKLivestatus and NagVis making the NDO needless
MKLivestatus is a brand new Nagios Event Broker (NEB) Module which can be used to extend the core of Nagios. The MKLivestatus module provides access to the live status information kept in the running Nagios process. It serves a unix socket for data exchange with external scripts/addons.
NagVis is the first Nagios addon which makes use of the new livestatus module. The MKLivestatus backend has been introduced to NagVis in version 1.4.5. Comparing to the NDO it will give you a big performance boost switching from NDO to Livestatus.
Read more about the new MKLivestatus module and the NagVis integration…
Nov/091
VBS/Perl: New nagios_downtime scripts
Some days ago I released new versions of my nagios_downtime scripts. The perl edition of the script has been released as version 0.5. The vbs edition for the windows hosts was released as version 0.8. The major change in both editions is the new deletion mode. You can now schedule downtime previous to taking the service/host down as usual. After bringing the service/host back online you can start the nagios_downtime scripts in “del” mode. This will delete the downtime in Nagios.
Oct/090
OSMC 2009 / NagVis
The Open Source Monitoring Conference on Nagios 2009 (OSMC 2009) happened yesterday and today in Nürnberg/Germany with many interesting presentations about Open Source Monitoring around Nagios.
I had a talk about the current progress in NagVis and development tasks we solve these days to bring NagVis to the 1.5 release. I talked about planned and already realized features for NagVis 1.5. The presentation was in German. You may download the slides from the official NagVis homepage.
Oct/090
Nagios VMWare ESX4 storage health check
ESX servers spread like wildfire in many environments these days. The same is happening over here. So I have to monitor ESX4 servers which are based on single HP DL380 G5 servers booting from USB stick and using the internal HDDs as storage for the virtual machines. The systems are using the internal P400 raid controller. A major failure on such a system would bring down a couple of systems. So it is essential to monitor the health of those systems in detail.
In the past when the VMWare ESX3 was used on the servers it was not possible to gather the health of the storage (HDDs, raid controller, logical discs). This seemed to be a problem of the included software (drivers) since it was possible to monitor such things on other vendors hardware.
With ESX4 the long-needed information are provided by the systems. It is possible to fetch the storage health information using the VI Perl Toolkit. So I wrote a small Nagios Plugin for checking the health of the storage system. I GPL’ed it and named it check_esx4_storage.pl.
Aug/090
Currently reading: Learning Nagios 3.0
Some weeks ago I recieved a copy of Learning Nagios 3.0 from Wojciech Kocjan as eBook version.
I had not much time to dig deep into the Learning Nagios 3.0 book yet. I could only quickly scan through the chapters. Some of the topics are very interesting and very detailed. Especially the explanation of Nagios plugins and configuration examples seem to be a good start for beginners on this topic. The template engine of the Nagios configuration is explained very well and should bring some know how about best practices.
There is a chapter about extending Nagios but I found no topic about common Nagios Addons like PNP4Nagios, Nagios Grapher for creating nice graphs based on the performance data. Additionally I am missing information about the NDO. I am also missing some hint about mapping with NagVis. Maybe it is not the main focus of the book to explain addons but this would be some nice things which complete this book.
In summary it looks like a good book. It’s main target seem to be users which are new to Nagios but have some knowledge in *nix. Even with some years of Nagios practice I found some interesting chapters in the book so it’s even good for advanced users.
May/092
NagVis 1.4 released
NagVis 1.4, the new major release of NagVis, was announced some days ago on 2009-05-22. NagVis is my most important Open Source project.
We improved NagVis with many Web 2.0 technologies and made it a bit more fancy. We also focused on better scalability and performance in large environments.
It was time to bring the release up since the last major release was announced nearly one year ago. In the meantime we added many features to NagVis and performed a big recode of the frontend to bring more rendering things to the client. This is more friendly for the Nagios host and gives some better ways to handle state changes on the client.
For a more detailed view on the NagVis 1.4 features take a look at the official NagVis homepage NagVis.org.
May/092
ICINGA is a Nagios fork
Today ICINGA was announced as a fork of the open source monitoring solution Nagios. As I am an active user of Nagios, a highly active community member and maintainer of the Nagios mapping addon NagVis I welcome the step of forking Nagios.
In fact it is a big step to fork a big and popular project like Nagios. But in this case the step was absolutely needed. Nagios and the NDO were not developed with a view at the community requests and needs in the last months year. There were many patches and bugfixes which need to be applied. There were many tries to make the thing easier for the Nagios developer but the response was not satisfying in the most cases.
The team behind ICINGA (including members of the Nagios Community Board) are promising that ICINGA will be compatible with the preceding versions of Nagios.
Apr/092
Nagios checks for Polycom GMS global directory entries
I administrate some Polycom video conferencing endpoints which are managed trough an instance of Polycom Global Management System (GMS). The video endpoints also use the Global Directory Service which is provided by the GMS. Some day I experienced problems where the clients could not recieve the entries of the global addressbook. In some cases this was the result of a problem on the GMS system where the addressbook was suddenly empty for some reason.
To identify the source of the problem faster in future I wanted to track the number of entries provided by the global addressbook. Since we use Nagios as monitoring plattform it was clear to write a new plugin for monitoring the number of addressbook entries. Read how I realized that check…
Feb/091
Nagios: Polycom RMX2000 port usage monitoring
Some days ago I was asked to monitor the usage of a RMX 2000 Real-Time Media Conferencing Platform from Polycom. Basically it is a video- and audio-conferencing bridge to host multi point conference calls. The bridge capacities are defined by the number of ports. You can assign these ports to audio- and video-processing. There is a small graph on the web interface of that bridge to see the current usage of these ports but there is no historical view for the port usage.
After some research I found a development kit on the usb stick with the current firmware release. You can download it at the download page of rmx 2000 on polycom website.
The development kit provides some documents describing the XML API and some tool to spy the xml requests and responses from and to the RMX 2000 bridge.
Using this sdk I created a simple check script in perl for monitoring the bridge port usage with Nagios. The script connects to the bridge, logs in and reads the current port usage. It outputs the current port usage as normal plugin output and as performance data for graphing.
You need to provide a valid user and password to the script to log in to the XML API. The monitoring account needs at least moderator privileges on the RMX 2000.
Hopefully this will help someone.
You can find the check plugin on the plugins page in projects section.
Offers
Projects
Misc
