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Nagios 3 guide

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swift at gentoo

Jul 5, 2008, 8:54 AM

Post #1 of 11 (5432 views)
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Nagios 3 guide

Hi Matthew

As I said on https://bugs.gentoo.org/131942 I'm going to focus my
attention on a document about Nagios and Gentoo. I don't know if you
or one of your colleagues is already working on Nagios documentation
for Gentoo?

My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.

Can you tell me if you know someone already working on similar documentation?

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen
--
gentoo-doc [at] lists mailing list

wolf31o2 at gentoo

Jul 7, 2008, 10:03 AM

Post #2 of 11 (5298 views)
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Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 17:54 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> Hi Matthew
>
> As I said on https://bugs.gentoo.org/131942 I'm going to focus my
> attention on a document about Nagios and Gentoo. I don't know if you
> or one of your colleagues is already working on Nagios documentation
> for Gentoo?
>
> My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
> they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
> would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
> necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
> systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.
>
> Can you tell me if you know someone already working on similar documentation?

If you need any technical assistance with this, let me know. I'm *very*
familiar with Nagios and integrating it with Gentoo.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

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swift at gentoo

Jul 7, 2008, 11:08 AM

Post #3 of 11 (5295 views)
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Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2 [at] gentoo> wrote:
> If you need any technical assistance with this, let me know. I'm *very*
> familiar with Nagios and integrating it with Gentoo.

Always. I'm not familiar with Nagios (only on lappy and lguest test
images) so any help is appreciated. I just committed my current draft
state (not much, but it shows the structure I'm hoping to go with as
well as the content I want to address in the guide).

What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).

You're free to edit the guide, even with just some <pre> tags to help
me with the technical stuff :-)

Also, this is not only targeted at Chris.

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen
--
gentoo-doc [at] lists mailing list

wolf31o2 at gentoo

Jul 8, 2008, 8:13 AM

Post #4 of 11 (5310 views)
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Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 20:08 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> Always. I'm not familiar with Nagios (only on lappy and lguest test
> images) so any help is appreciated. I just committed my current draft
> state (not much, but it shows the structure I'm hoping to go with as
> well as the content I want to address in the guide).

Ahh. I use Nagios 2 and Nagios 3 to monitor Gentoo, Red Hat, NetApp
Filers, Solaris, Cisco switches/routers/firewalls, power distribution
units, etc.

> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).

Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
*neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.

> You're free to edit the guide, even with just some <pre> tags to help
> me with the technical stuff :-)

Sure. I'll send my edits here first, though.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

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matthew.summers at liquidustech

Jul 8, 2008, 8:16 AM

Post #5 of 11 (5311 views)
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Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 20:08 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
>> Always. I'm not familiar with Nagios (only on lappy and lguest test
>> images) so any help is appreciated. I just committed my current draft
>> state (not much, but it shows the structure I'm hoping to go with as
>> well as the content I want to address in the guide).
>
> Ahh. I use Nagios 2 and Nagios 3 to monitor Gentoo, Red Hat, NetApp
> Filers, Solaris, Cisco switches/routers/firewalls, power distribution
> units, etc.
>
>> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
>> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
>> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
>> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
>
> Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.
>
>> You're free to edit the guide, even with just some <pre> tags to help
>> me with the technical stuff :-)
>
> Sure. I'll send my edits here first, though.
>
Once these early drafts are in place I'll stick the interns on them for editing, etc.
I'm certainly looking forward to this bit o' doc!
Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew W. Summers

Chief Executive Officer & Systems Engineer
Liquidus Tech, LLC
218 1/2 Park Central West
Springfield, MO 65806
(417) 894-2607
matthew.summers [at] liquidustech
www.liquidustech.com
--
gentoo-doc [at] lists mailing list

swift at gentoo

Jul 26, 2008, 1:02 PM

Post #6 of 11 (5227 views)
Permalink

Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2 [at] gentoo> wrote:
>> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
>> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
>> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
>> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
>
> Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.

Is it possible to monitor multiple systems (with Nagios) without
NRPE/ssh but still on the same /nagios site? Or do you log on to every
single system to obtain the monitoring overview of all services on
that system?

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen

dertobi123 at gentoo

Jul 27, 2008, 4:52 AM

Post #7 of 11 (5229 views)
Permalink

Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2 [at] gentoo> wrote:
> >> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
> >> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
> >> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
> >> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
> >
> > Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> > *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.
>
> Is it possible to monitor multiple systems (with Nagios) without
> NRPE/ssh but still on the same /nagios site? Or do you log on to every
> single system to obtain the monitoring overview of all services on
> that system?

Guess Chris was referring to monitor boxes on a local network using SNMP
(for which we have net-analyzer/nagios-plugins-snmp in addition to the
standard snmp checks from the nagios-plugins package).

Tobias
--
Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution
http://www.mitp.de/1769

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wolf31o2 at gentoo

Jul 28, 2008, 10:26 AM

Post #8 of 11 (5211 views)
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Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 22:02 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2 [at] gentoo> wrote:
> >> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
> >> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
> >> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
> >> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
> >
> > Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> > *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.
>
> Is it possible to monitor multiple systems (with Nagios) without
> NRPE/ssh but still on the same /nagios site? Or do you log on to every
> single system to obtain the monitoring overview of all services on
> that system?

Umm... You can monitor any number of hosts. I'm monitoring over 100
systems from a single Nagios instance, and I do not use NRPE or SSH for
*any* of my monitoring. I use SNMP.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

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swift at gentoo

Jul 30, 2008, 12:02 PM

Post #9 of 11 (5196 views)
Permalink

Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Sven Vermeulen <swift [at] gentoo> wrote:
> My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
> they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
> would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
> necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
> systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.

Who knew integrating Gentoo specific metrics was this easy - just
download some scripts and integrate them ;-)

Well, I've somewhat finished what I could do for the Nagios guide.
Although it does talk about remote system integration (using
check_nrpe and a quick pointer on passwordless SSH) it definitely
needs some more lovin' on this behalf.

At this moment, I'm waiting for Nagios 3 to become stable on Gentoo so
that I can rerun the guide over again on a clean install (to make sure
no errors are in it) but please, everybody with some experience with
Nagios and some free time, take a look at the document
(http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nagios-guide.xml) and add in some
paragraphs on topics you want to see added as well.

Dertobi wanted to see a chapter on extending the installation - if you
have a few pointers I don't mind taking a stab at this as well.

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen

wolf31o2 at gentoo

Jul 30, 2008, 5:15 PM

Post #10 of 11 (5204 views)
Permalink

Re: Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 21:02 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Sven Vermeulen <swift [at] gentoo> wrote:
> > My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
> > they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
> > would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
> > necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
> > systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.
>
> Who knew integrating Gentoo specific metrics was this easy - just
> download some scripts and integrate them ;-)
>
> Well, I've somewhat finished what I could do for the Nagios guide.
> Although it does talk about remote system integration (using
> check_nrpe and a quick pointer on passwordless SSH) it definitely
> needs some more lovin' on this behalf.
>
> At this moment, I'm waiting for Nagios 3 to become stable on Gentoo so
> that I can rerun the guide over again on a clean install (to make sure
> no errors are in it) but please, everybody with some experience with
> Nagios and some free time, take a look at the document
> (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nagios-guide.xml) and add in some
> paragraphs on topics you want to see added as well.

I was planning on giving you some CVS diffs. ;]

> Dertobi wanted to see a chapter on extending the installation - if you
> have a few pointers I don't mind taking a stab at this as well.

Well, Tobias mentioned the nagios-plugins-snmp package in the tree.
I've got something like 20 or 30 more Nagios-related packages in my
company's overlay. I didn't add them to the tree because I didn't want
to maintain them, knowing that I was close to retirement.

I *do* plan on making the packages available via an overlay. Hopefully,
they'll be picked up by someone from the netmon team and added to the
tree.

I guess that I should also mention that I have several modifications to
Nagios' ebuilds, along with Cacti (and several other SNMP management
packages) which I will also be making available. I've been working on
an extension to the HOST-RESOURCES MIB to get package information and
export it via SNMP, much like is done on RPM-based distributions, but
it's taking a bit longer than I had originally anticipated. That's
honestly the only "Gentoo-specific" items that I can recall which
someone would want.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Ex-Developer

dertobi123 at gentoo

Jul 31, 2008, 9:10 AM

Post #11 of 11 (5188 views)
Permalink

Re: Re: Nagios 3 guide [In reply to]

Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > At this moment, I'm waiting for Nagios 3 to become stable on Gentoo so
> > that I can rerun the guide over again on a clean install (to make sure
> > no errors are in it) but please, everybody with some experience with
> > Nagios and some free time, take a look at the document
> > (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nagios-guide.xml) and add in some
> > paragraphs on topics you want to see added as well.

I'm going to file a stable request for our architectures teams somewhen
next week probably. I'll take a look at that guide and also reference it
in the postinstall-note :)

> I was planning on giving you some CVS diffs. ;]

dito ;)

> > Dertobi wanted to see a chapter on extending the installation - if you
> > have a few pointers I don't mind taking a stab at this as well.

pointers are pnp4nagios and nagvis - integrating pnp4nagios is quite
simple, i'll send in a diff this weekend. As for nagvis i'm working on
an ebuild right now, also integration this is a bit more complicated,
that's something for an 1.1 version of this guide.

> Well, Tobias mentioned the nagios-plugins-snmp package in the tree.
> I've got something like 20 or 30 more Nagios-related packages in my
> company's overlay. I didn't add them to the tree because I didn't want
> to maintain them, knowing that I was close to retirement.
>
> I *do* plan on making the packages available via an overlay. Hopefully,
> they'll be picked up by someone from the netmon team and added to the
> tree.

Point me to an overlay and i'll take a look at it. It's my motivation to
make the Nagios integration into Gentoo as best as possible. With
integrating lots of useful plugins we make a huge difference to other
distributions which in most cases only include the nagios-plugins
package and that's it.

> I guess that I should also mention that I have several modifications to
> Nagios' ebuilds, along with Cacti (and several other SNMP management
> packages) which I will also be making available. I've been working on
> an extension to the HOST-RESOURCES MIB to get package information and
> export it via SNMP, much like is done on RPM-based distributions, but
> it's taking a bit longer than I had originally anticipated. That's
> honestly the only "Gentoo-specific" items that I can recall which
> someone would want.

Interested in that ;)

Tobias

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