To: "Roy S. Rapoport" rsr@inorganic.org, baylisa@baylisa.org
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 21:04:55 -0500
From: J C Lawrence claw@kanga.nu
Subject: Re: Good Agentless monitoring packages?

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 15:55:40 -0800
Roy S Rapoport rsr@inorganic.org wrote:

> If you want to stay as pure SNMP as possible, you probably want to
> check out MRTG, though it's much more capable in the trending arena
> than in the alarming arena.

If you're just doing graphing then Cricket is damned slick.

--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 20:04:57 -0500
From: Chuck Yerkes chuck+baylisa@snew.com
To: baylisa@baylisa.org
Subject: Re: Good Agentless monitoring packages?

Quoting Roy S. Rapoport (rsr@inorganic.org):
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 04:21:37PM -0800, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
> > I'm looking for a decent agentless monitoring package.. I've been using
> > netsaint/nagios for a few years, and like it, but I need something that's
> > a bit easier to chew on, using already included tools like snmp or rpcstats

> You're talking to a bunch of sysadmins -- you can probably get a little
> more technical than "a bit easier to chew on." :)

> If you want to stay as pure SNMP as possible, you probably want to check
> out MRTG, though it's much more capable in the trending arena than in the
> alarming arena.

I try to think of SNMP (v3) as a reasonable transport method
for a lot of things.

In pulling, I can get about any data I want.
In pushing, I can trip scripts/programs as I need.
Mutterings by users of embedded (and less embedded)
to allow an snmp-set that comes via authenticated and encrypted V3
to reboot a box.

I use rrdtool to graph things - been really eye opening to
some folks here to see WHEN it starts to swap heavily and
how many database users are hitting something.

Events can be tripped as well.

I'm running some snmpget stuff LOCALLY, checking thresholds
and emits traps (to UniCenter) for several things.

snmpdf is really handy when you've got 100 servers (to show "df" info
without having to log in). Web front ends are easy to whip up with
PHP or perl. It's a transport method - and net-snmp with the HOST MIB
gives LOTS of useful information.

From: "John P. Looney" valen@tuatha.org
To: Irish LUG list ilug@linux.ie
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i
Subject: [ILUG] tip of the day
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 16:54:36 +0000

If you are looking after machines, check out nagios. It's quite good - it
does all sorts of monitoring, so you don't have to. You can set it up to
monitor all your servers, and email you when things go bad - like the
exchange server stops responding to IMAP queries..

More importantly, most of the plugins have "warning thresholds"; for
instance, I monitor all my machines to make sure that they have at least
20% free on all disk partitions. It's nice to get an email saying the
webserver is 85% full, because someone left a PHP page echoing a few dozen
kilobytes to disk every time it's hit....before the website falls over.

However, it uses snmp to do much of it's work, and on my little raq3 that
does this monitoring, the load is quite high, as snmpget is a very
expensive program to start off (something like .45 of a second), as it has
to read through around a meg of structured text MIB files, every time it
starts.

However, Mr Brady pointed me in the direction of;
http://freshmeat.net/releases/107146/

which is an snmp proxy for nagios. I changed my polling time from eight
minutes to three, and the load went from three to 0.0 - for the first time
in months!

John

From: "AJ McKee" aj.mckee@nmtbmedia.com
To: "'Irish LUG list'" ilug@linux.ie
Subject: RE: [ILUG] tip of the day
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 17:02:43 -0000

The cool thing about Nagios is the versatility. With sms_client you can
have it sms you alerts, send you email or run just about any command you
want. We also have it capable of receiving an sms and showing the status
to a customer. It's a rockin' app.

One easy thing though which has eluded me a little as I ain't a perl
head is I am trying to get a perl script fetch a web page and find a
particular phrase that is on that web page. If its not found then send
an alert to nagios, if it is found then do nothing. Currently I have it
working in php, but now perl. Any ideas?

Nagios rocks.

Aj