Using Nagios in CentOS (It was Re: [CentOS] Somewhat OT: (Nagios))

Thu May 15 11:31:52 UTC 2008
Sergio Belkin <sebelk at gmail.com>

2008/5/14 Thomas Harold <tgh at tgharold.com>:
> Sergio Belkin wrote:
>>
>> 2008/5/13  <jleaver+centos at reachone.com>:
>>
>> OK, you won :) I'm going to test  nagios. I am using centos 5.1
>> x86_64. Do I lose much if I use rpm from rpmforge (version 2.9)?
>>
>
> We're running version 2.11 at the office (on CentOS 5.1 x86_64).  I've
> looked at some of the things in 3.0, but there's nothing there that I needed
> yet.
>
> Hopefully you have some way to track changes in /etc/nagios (FSVS is what we
> use), because it will make your life much easier to have an audit trail.
>
> We created sub-folders under /etc/nagios to hold the various types of
> entities.  For example, we have:
>
> /etc/nagios/commands
> /etc/nagios/contacts
> /etc/nagios/contactgroups
> /etc/nagios/hosts-switches
> /etc/nagios/hosts-dmz
> /etc/nagios/hosts-servers
> /etc/nagios/hosts-lan
> /etc/nagios/templates-hosts
> /etc/nagios/templates-services
>
> We then broke individual elements out of the default massive configuration
> folder into individual .cfg files.  For example, we chose to create
> individual files for each contact rather the putting them all in a single
> file.  So far it works well, it's a lot easier to get a feel for what users
> have been defined, what hosts are defined, what the templates are.  Because
> when I look in templates-services, I see from the directory listing that I
> have service templates named X, Y and Z (without having to open up the file
> to look).
>
> We currently put service checks for individual hosts in the same
> configuration file as the host.  So you will have the following definitions
> in a typical host file (until you get into templating):
>
> define host{
> define hostextinfo{
> define service{
> define service{
> ...
>
> Any plugins that we wrote ourself, we put under a separate folder. Which
> keeps them separate from
>
> /usr/local/lib64/nagios-plugins/
>
> Basically, start small, track your changes, and plan on refactoring it in
> week #2 after you start monitoring about a dozen hosts.  Stay away from
> advanced things like escalation, monitoring things like disk space on remote
> servers, or the like until you get the basics working.
>
> Oh, and SELinux will probably get in your way.  So you'll need to play with
> audit2allow to create supplemental policy to give Nagios additional
> permissions.  (Which may have been due to PEBKAC issues on my end - I plan
> on going back and looking at labeling and figuring out what I mislabeled.)
>
> I think that's the majority of the issues that we dealt with in the past 2
> weeks.  We're now in fine-tuning mode and getting ready to start monitoring
> remote services next week.
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Really, thanks all for your experiences. Bear in mind that what I want
to do is (mainly) monitor  network switches, and get data and charts
of them. I hope I can do that.

Keep in touch

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