Monitoring my network with NethServer

Hello All!

On my wishlist would be something for monitoring the network. I manage about 20 networks for clients.
At the moment I’m still running FAN Nagios, one at each site / client, but that’s outdated and urgently needs to be replaced. I’ve installed and played around with several, including the mentionned Observium, Zabbix, Cacti…

My favorite turns out to be Zabbix. Best of all, it’s actually quite easy to install on Nethserver 7x.
It can handle graphs, several maps, scalability and can use agents, snmp or external testing.
It’s basically one package, and that’s all that needs to be saved. A package in software center would be really nice!

Observium can’t handle agent testing or external tests, but it does snmp the best. I use it mainly additionally for clients with vLans and managed Switches. It does have a map, but that’s not quite in the same league as Nagios or Zabbix offers…

Cacti looks and feels like a big building site, no matter if website or app: Messy, dusty and noisy! And saving a DB (mysql or mariadb) AND rrd-files?

Virtualisation on Nethserver is OK, but I still prefer using Proxmox…
Just the feature of Online Backup for Windows Servers incl. Ms-SQL alone is a winner for my clients.
Automatic failover in the PVE Cluster just makes things sweeter.

How would I start to go about to make a Module for NethServer?
Available are Proxmox VM based testing Nethservers, know-how of the Template System from SME, and enough coding skills in PHP, Perl, whatever to do it. But where to start best?

My 2 cents!
Thx to all contributing to make a great distribution!

Andy, from Switzerland

3 Likes

Hi Andy,

do you know OMD? I think it’s really a good monitoring suite.

Hi

@mrmarkuz

OMD does look good - and I do have the know-how and experience to handle Nagios / iCinga.

However, one of the main arguments for Zabbix and against most Nagios / iCinga and others:
It comes from one company, is in one release tarball. No dependencys on other projects or tools.

Ever try to get a grafik showing load of a server or network link from Nagios? Yes, you NEED 3rd Party Components. Grafana, NagVis, et al. Loads of third party dependencys. When sh*t happens, everyone passes the blame to someone else, no one actually fixes it.

I tried for hours to get Zabbix to make a graph, only then did I realise the grapf was there all along, out of the box as default. The only additions are Test-Templates, which can be third party. OK, the prefered way is using agents (available for Windows, Linux/UNIX and Mac), but SNMP monitoring works extremly well.

The testing was clinched, when a test environment of Zabbix showed me an available Update on a 2010 Synology (Running only to make 2nd generation in house saves of the new Synology).
I was never able to get that much information out of Nagios / iCinga…
Mind you, I even had my Nagios reporting Phone Calls, VoIP Info and the usual System data via SNMP from my Snom SIPfones…

All Information and events are stored in a MySQL or MariaDB Database, so for backup you only need a Tarball of the current directory and the Database dump.
I’m running Zabbix now in a vm on proxmox, but I prefer to have it integrated in Nethserver or whatever my clients are using (I have some running a Mac Server). Some clients do not have a vm environment but use only one Server (Linux or Mac) and a NAS (mostly Synology, some older Thecus) for Infrastructure. Zabbix would work in these environments well too.

But OMD is still an interesting collection / tool to have in one’s library…

My 2 cents…

Best regards

Andy Wismer, from Switzerland

That’s right, but with OMD you have one installation package and get all the tools ready to work, including Grafana, NagVis etc.

There is a plugin for OMD:

In OMD check_mk you have a nice web UI for making backups and you are able to roll back every action, you made…

I’ll give it a try. I tested Zabbix long ago so I don’t know how it improved…

My Home and testing environment, in Zabbix:

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Wow, SME, Nethserver, Raspi, Mac, FreeBSD, Windows…this is really a heterogeneous network.
And you monitor all these systems with Zabbix? I’ll have to try it…

1 Like

Yes, I’ll admit to have been lazy or overworked, take your choice.
The VoIP environment isn’t monitored here (yet)
I also use OpenBSD as public DNS Servers (also monitored via SNMP)
There’s also a full Z-Wave based Home Automation System,
an Audio System based on AirPlay, Bose Soundtouch and others (Monitored in Nagios, but Zabbix - not yet).
There’s also a full Video Monitoring System, using SecuritySpy for Mac, but I also use and support Axis, Synology so there’s also a test environment for those. They’re just not depicted in Zabbix (yet).

I just started on Zabbix 1.5 months ago, now already deployed at 4 clients, all reachable with LetsEncrypt SSL via Internet. I’ve been using Nagios for the past years, before that maybe 10 years using BigBrother / BigSister.
But I must say, I really like the concept of Zabbix. It’s really well scalable, can use low-power Proxies (running zB. on Raspberry) for other, non central sites connected via VPN.

And - it comes from one company, as one package or tarball. You can download finished VMs - for almost ANY Platform you want. 15 Mins, and you’re ready to go.
I’m running Zabbix out of such a VM downloaded container, although in the meantime I’ve “enhanced” the VMs.
More Disk, RAM, updated, SNMP and other tools like htop, mc, screen, backup…

It’s worth the while, for sure! Hope you like it!

See this example, from a client:

Andy

1 Like

Thanks for the information.

I’ll give you a report after testing…

http://docs.nethserver.org/projects/nethserver-devel/en/latest/rpm_rules.html
https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=developer:nethserver_7_kickstart#nethserver_7_kickstart
https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=developer

1 Like