Nagios Monitoring & Branches of?

[DHR]

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.

 

[DHR]

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.

 

[DHR]

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.

 

[DHR]

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

SCOM ..... possibly the worst monitoring product for SMBs

 

[DHR]

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!)

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?

 

[DHR]

We use PRTG monitoring ourselves - have used nagios and dabbled with solarwinds in the past.

Are you paying for monitors or have you found the 100 sensors enough to cover the basics?

 

[DHR]

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]

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 ?

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

 

[DHR]

Cheers BongoHunter, made some progress it's just slow. I suppose once it's nailed down rollout will be so much easier though.

Managed to get the poweshell module talking to icinga, so it pulls down the agent and nsclient++ installs and does some config that's working pretty well. It's just getting the plugins and checks in place now.

Because I've jumped straight into using icinga Director I think my understanding of the nature of the plugins has suffered a little.

 

[DHR]

Made some awesome progress at last with icinga2 and director, feeling a lot more confident and can start rolling agents out soon.

Trying to get my head around a decent way to capture cpu usage over time, but aside from that i'm more comfortable than before.

Just contemplating looking at getting some graphing stuff installed ideally with a bit of data retention too.

 

[DHR]

So looping back round to total annoyance again!

I've looped around a handful of solutions for data retention and graphing, was strugling to get graphite going for some reason, but InfluxDB and Grafana seemed perfect. I've now hit a wall with that whereby I'm not convinced I can grab the statistics from things coming from nscp losing the will!

Everything I've read this afternoon is pointing toward using telegraf instead for windows hosts Soon as I box something off and feel like I've made progress, another 10 open!

 

[DHR]

Icinga2, Grafana and Influx DB is what we used where I used to work. I can share this thread with the guy who designed it if you want pointing in the right direction?

Yeah go for it that'd be cool. I'm pretty much there with it now. Biggest disappointment really is the CPU monitoring with nsclient for Windows not being able to take samples without you running the webserver in each agent. Need to look at different ways to capture that.

It's been (and will continue to be) a struggle to get to grips with.

I did look at Zabbix but I went toward icinga based on install base size and that stupidly thinking the community support etc would be better.