Loving Nagios!

[Ric_]

Just a quick note to say that I have been setting Nagios up over the past few days on my Debian box. If you have been considering installing some kind of monitoring software, I can highly recommend it - it's well worth the time it takes to configure!

 

So far, I have set up Nagios to automagically ping all my managed sitches and my main servers to check that they are still 'alive' and I am currently setting up pings to my network printers, along with pulling the JetDirect printer status.

 

I will be configuring further devices and hopefully adding in some SNMP stuff over the next week or two. At the moment it is proving very handy to be able to see at a glance which printers are low on toner or which network links are down.

[eduabncs]

Nagios is very good & we used it until recently. We also used MRTG to monitor bandwith.

 

Due to projects in the pipeline we needed monitoring software that can do both and pull that info together in various ways, we chose Solarwinds. Not cheap, but like Nagios it's very configurable and has templates for just about everything we want to do.

[Ric_]

For those of you who haven't seen Nagios yet (you haven't lived), I thought I'd post a couple of quick screen grabs.

 

I will apologise for the smallness of this iMacs screen firstly and I must also apologise for my dmub-ass server which is refusing to allow me to edit the extended info for the devices (hence why everything appears as a question mark). I'm getting there though

[NetworkGeezer]

@Ric_

 

"Dumb-ass server"?

 

So it's not just Russ who's slowly turning American.

 

There's still a bit of Englisman left

I will apologise for the smallness of this iMacs screen firstly

[Geoff]

Have you also got Cacti Ric?

[Ric_]

@Geoff: That's phase 2

[ChrisH]

I thought phase 2 was to get rid of those question marks?

[Ric_]

I thought phase 2 was to get rid of those question marks?

 

You would be thinking of 'phase 1b'

[spc-rocket]

Hi Ric,

 

Looks very good and have heard lots of postive things about Nagios. Shame its not available for Windows platform.

 

Ash.

[Geoff]

Nagios works just fine on windows. You need Active Perl, MySQL and Apache installed for it to run sucessfully.

[Ric_]

@ashok: Check out http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ and download a prebuilt 'virtual appliance' which can be run in the free VMWare Player or VMWare Server

 

Not tried them yet myself but they are supposedly VERY easy to set up and have a very low overhead... you could even run it on your workstation without noticing.

 

@geoff: What exactly do you monitor with Cacti? I assume it's something along the lines of MRTG and Cacti to give pretty graphs of the traffic between switches.

[Geoff]

What exactly do you monitor with Cacti? I assume it's something along the lines of MRTG and Cacti to give pretty graphs of the traffic between switches.

 

Cacti is basically a nice pretty web interface to configuring RRDTool (The sucessor to MRTG) and the resulting graphs. I graph the network switches (per port traffic, per VLAN traffic) and also the Linux (Network traffic, CPU usage, Disk usage, memory usage) and Windows Servers (same as Linux).

 

It basically gives you that 'historic' overview nagios can't show you.

[MkII]

Our LA have implemented what looks like Cacti from what i've seen - and use it exactly as Geoff has said. Server load graphs were very interesting and look very useful for assigning rolles/ maximising the hardware.

[spc-rocket]

Hi Guys,

 

Thanks for the information.

 

@Ric

@Geoff

 

I'll check out the VMwave and also have a look at getting the PHP and Perl on one of the machines.

 

At the moment we are using "The Dude" The Dude which is quite good but doesn't do all the things we need it to do.

 

 

Ashok.

[spc-rocket]

Nagios works just fine on windows. You need Active Perl, MySQL and Apache installed for it to run sucessfully.

 

Geoff,

 

Got any destuctions for the setup you reffering to above.

 

Ash.

[Geoff]

I'm fairly sure there was a sourceforge project that prepackaged everything into a nice easy installer for windows. I shall attempt to find it.

 

Cacti works out the box btw. You can use that with any WAMP install.

[Geoff]

Found it. It's called NINO.

 

http://nino.sourceforge.net/

[spc-rocket]

That's great Geoff,

 

Thanks!

 

Ash.

[spc-rocket]

Geoff,

 

Just looked at NINO. I'm presuming that i install this and will install Perl, PHP, Apache and MySQL. Can i then use the nagios package to run nagios. Just trying to figure out where to put the extracted nagios files after the NINO is installed or is NINO with everything integrated inc. Nagios?

 

Thanks!

 

Ash.

[plexer]

Looking at it I would say it's a complete install using nagios as it's management and monitoring program.

 

Ben

[Geoff]

If you install the NINO package, you don't need anything else.

[spc-rocket]

Thanks for the clarification guys.

 

Ash.

[uk101man]

For those of you who haven't seen Nagios yet (you haven't lived), I thought I'd post a couple of quick screen grabs.

 

I will apologise for the smallness of this iMacs screen firstly and I must also apologise for my dmub-ass server which is refusing to allow me to edit the extended info for the devices (hence why everything appears as a question mark). I'm getting there though

 

Hi Ric,

 

Where did you get your Nagios from and how did you set it up to get the HP information?

 

Cheers

 

Tom

[Geoff]

I think the printer info just gets detected via SNMP. There's nothing HP specific involved. Any SNMP aware printer would work.

[Ric_]

I installed Nagios on Debian using the apt package. For the HP printer info, I simply used the check_hpjd plugin - I think that this is an extension of the check_snmp plugin.

 

Most things can be checked with check_snmp - check http://www.nagiosexchange.org for more hints.