Nagios Monitoring & Branches of?

DHR

DHR

DHR

Soldato
Joined
30 Apr 2003
Posts
3,532
Looking to overhaul my monitoring solutions and have had Nagios mentioned to me a few times.

Anyone here use it in anger? Would be monitoring a mix of local Windows environments along with Azure & AWS infrastructure.
 
Nagios is widely deployed and so are its siblings like CheckMK and Icinga

TBH its had its day and should be killed off as soon as possible

If you want something modern I would be looking at Prometheus, with Grafana for frontend if you want dashboards

Use the Prometheus Alert Manager addon to handle you alerts

If you need logging analysis add ELK into the mix

All are free, opensource, well maintained with good documentation.

https://prometheus.io/
https://grafana.com/
https://www.elastic.co/
 
Will have a look into those others thanks.

Just seen auto correct decided to go nuts on the thread title too :-( if a mod is around can you change it to Nagios from nations! Thanks.
 
We've recently moved from Solarwinds to a homebrew combination of Dashing, Icinga and Grafana.

Superb set and wish we'd done it forever ago.

That said, don't underestimate the effort to stay on top of it all.
 
That's what I'm most concerned about. I need something that is largely set and forget, was waiting for status cake to get their windows monitoring sorted but they've let us down.
 
You need to automate everything you can with monitoring - manually rolling out agents, check's and alerting configuration is not supportable.

So really you want agents/instrumentation rolled into your build process, and that same process also making any required updates to your monitoring config to pickup new endpoints to scrape etc.

E.G if you use Kubernetes or say OpenStack, get a script to update a configuration file for prometheus in Git or some other SCM tool at the moment of deployment, and have something like Jenkins watching the repo and doing the deploy of configuration file to the prometheus box for you.

Similar stuff can be done for Nagios with its hosts.cfg and other associated files, or with Icinga you have your build process call the rest API to add the host into monitoring.

Obviously will all depend hugely on the size of your environment, the technologies used and probably most importantly the culture and expertise available in your organisation. It takes a bit of re-education and shift in mindset for people from a traditional ITIL/ITSM type support model moving into this new style of agile/devops/modern/new-style stuff (delete as appropriate!)
 
If your a wintel shop - do not be drawn to SCOM, I'm sure some organisations have made it work, but most do not get the anticipated level of success, and it's a ****** to support and move away from
 
BongoHunter said:
If your a wintel shop - do not be drawn to SCOM, I'm sure some organisations have made it work, but most do not get the anticipated level of success, and it's a ****** to support and move away from
Click to expand...

SCOM ..... possibly the worst monitoring product for SMBs :-)
 
BongoHunter said:
You need to automate everything you can with monitoring - manually rolling out agents, check's and alerting configuration is not supportable.

So really you want agents/instrumentation rolled into your build process, and that same process also making any required updates to your monitoring config to pickup new endpoints to scrape etc.

E.G if you use Kubernetes or say OpenStack, get a script to update a configuration file for prometheus in Git or some other SCM tool at the moment of deployment, and have something like Jenkins watching the repo and doing the deploy of configuration file to the prometheus box for you.

Similar stuff can be done for Nagios with its hosts.cfg and other associated files, or with Icinga you have your build process call the rest API to add the host into monitoring.

Obviously will all depend hugely on the size of your environment, the technologies used and probably most importantly the culture and expertise available in your organisation. It takes a bit of re-education and shift in mindset for people from a traditional ITIL/ITSM type support model moving into this new style of agile/devops/modern/new-style stuff (delete as appropriate!)
Click to expand...

I get that, it feels like there is no middle ground at the moment. I suppose it's a case of where to start right now. You have an existing estate, you need to monitor it, surely with the discussed solutions you can script up agent / config installation without integrating it at the start of the build process?
 
It's tricky for existing stuff if you have a mix of kit and configs, if youve got any deployment tools already for pushing stuff out to your estate then use it, if not then a bit of powershell to pull down agents and the bits you need to each box is probably the way to go, and template the agent configs by server role and OS version
 
question if i may?

any suggestions about monitoring specific VMware based estates - that can plug into the mentioned dashboards?

e.g. If a server has an issue, a drive has failed SMART check or a disk has failed - to show up on the dashboard itself?
 
You may be better off monitoring your iDRAC / ILO or whatever if you want to get the status of individual disks.
 
If using HP Servers than you want to be using HP OneView if on G8 and above (might support G7 - cant remeber) - its a Virtual Appliance, and I believe you can use it in "Monitoring" mode rather than "Management" mode if you dont have ILO advanced licences.

OneView has a good API and also offers a message bus for pulling the data out of it and into whatever other tools you are using.

If using older HP kit you can use HP Systems Insight Manager (7.4 is the latest iirc) - you'll then need to find or build a connector for you main monitoring tools / grafana - or whatever else you using to visulaise stuff.

If using Dell kit - Then you probably want OpenManage Essentials (OME) - I cant remeber what integration features this offers, but its underpinned by MSSQL so you can just poll that for Alerts and other info.

Not sure on other vendor specific tools - we use the Nagios check_snmp to pull stuff out of SuperMicro boxes, and the same for legacy Sun systems
 
BongoHunter said:
If using HP Servers than you want to be using HP OneView if on G8 and above (might support G7 - cant remeber) - its a Virtual Appliance, and I believe you can use it in "Monitoring" mode rather than "Management" mode if you dont have ILO advanced licences.

OneView has a good API and also offers a message bus for pulling the data out of it and into whatever other tools you are using.

If using older HP kit you can use HP Systems Insight Manager (7.4 is the latest iirc) - you'll then need to find or build a connector for you main monitoring tools / grafana - or whatever else you using to visulaise stuff.

If using Dell kit - Then you probably want OpenManage Essentials (OME) - I cant remeber what integration features this offers, but its underpinned by MSSQL so you can just poll that for Alerts and other info.

Not sure on other vendor specific tools - we use the Nagios check_snmp to pull stuff out of SuperMicro boxes, and the same for legacy Sun systems
Click to expand...

thank you - most helpful :)
 
Been having a play with icinga, looking pretty good in theory.

Believe you can point the silent installer to a generic URL to pull the .ini file down which I've not tried yet. Thinking of doing that and just pushing clients via SCCM.

Does anyone have a custom ini or resource for Windows server with useful perf counters etc pre-formatted ?
 
DHR said:
Been having a play with icinga, looking pretty good in theory.

Believe you can point the silent installer to a generic URL to pull the .ini file down which I've not tried yet. Thinking of doing that and just pushing clients via SCCM.

Does anyone have a custom ini or resource for Windows server with useful perf counters etc pre-formatted ?
Click to expand...


So with minimal time available I've had my ass handed to me by Icinga, probably just worn out, got it installed, director installed (so I thought) but I'm at a loss where to go from there, was wanting to use the powershell module to point to director and configure nsclient++ like that but i'm at a loss where to start with the host templates at the moment.

Documentation doesn't seem amazing for it and I've found there is a bit of a lack of useful blogs and videos on it, all of them have a vagueness about them... which then makes me think I'm missing something specific from my understanding that's stopping me from progressing it :rolleyes:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom