Monitoring programs - Adagios, Nagios, Icinga and so on

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Do you know the program icinga? This is a monitoring program. It can send e-mails. So you have more control and can do something quicker to a threat. You can find something on the website https://www.icinga.org/ or http://docs.icinga.org/icinga2/latest/doc/module/icinga2/toc.

What do you think about it?

What do I need to know about any incidents. I need the message via mail or app on my phone or something like that.

Does anyone have a suggestion for it?

Oh! I need messages about firewall, services, unauthorized access attempts, free disk space for example.

Greetings Mario

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Hi Mario,

I am not totally aware of the capabilities of the Nagios module the Monitoring Module of Nethserver uses but isn’t is already possible with the current module? The monitoring of the different devices has do be done by yourself. I don’t think, that there is an out-of-the-box solution on the market for free.

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Icinga is a Nagios alternative, sadly Nagios doesn’t behave well on CenOS 7.

Probably, we will have naemon in the near future.

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Uhmmmm Is the choice for a monitoring application a done deal?
I think we should have a thorough search for applications that might be (a better) option.
Can you elaborate why Nagios ‘doesn’t behave well’ on CentOS7? (installing Adagios on CentOS7 is publishe don github: Create new page · opinkerfi/adagios Wiki · GitHub)

Some possible alternatives to Adagios:
Zabbix: http://www.zabbix.com/
Munin: http://munin-monitoring.org/
LibreNMS: http://www.librenms.org/
Cacti: http://www.cacti.net/
Monitorix: http://www.monitorix.org/
NetXMS: https://www.netxms.org/

But before pointing to any solution, we should have a list of features that are ‘Must-have’ and ‘Nice-to-have’
Then find the solutions that contain those features.
Besides the features, IMO it is also important to find a solution that matches current features of NS7: use a database, webserver etc that already is in use for other features so we don’t need to add another different environment.

Sure it is good if there is ‘a’ monitoring tool available for NS7, but it only would feel like a community effort if the choice is also community driven.

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I didn’t know! Last time I checked, pnp4nagios and mk-livestatus didn’t work on CentOS7.

We have a commercial product based on Adagios, so yes, it’s a done deal at least for NS 6.8.
I think that if Adagios correctly works on CentOS 7, we can port it do NS 7 (along with the commercial module). The community will automatically benefit of Adagios installation.

By the way, I’m open to any new monitoring solution but since now, I couldn’t find one I really like.
In fact, we built our own (based on collectd and facter) for our customers.

Edit: maybe @nrauso can shed some light on this :slight_smile:

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My question was if adagios would be dropped, would it be a done deal to move to naemon.
If Adagios is still in the picture and it can be ported to CentOS7, then I don’t see a need for any other monitoring application.

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Great discussion, I can’t get if @Mario_Spang is asking more info about monitoring module or it’s just a generic question. Guess we have to split the discussion about nagios/naemon/adagios as monitoring module.

I guess that @nrauso, who’re in charge with that, can explain the situation as well as I hope that we can find/test together a good alternative to nagios!

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Hi all!
The situation about Adagios/NS7 is almost “fluid” but I’ll try to clear things out.
Until now there were some compatibility problems to get Adagios over CentOS7, not for Nagios itself but for some other packages that Adagios takes advantage of:

  • mk-livestatus (needed for status data)
  • pnp4nagios (needed for graphs)

Boiled down: without those packages you loose the frontend.
To clarify take a look here: https://github.com/opinkerfi/adagios/issues/585

In the last week Adagios developers wrote out a new procedure to install Adagios on CentOS7 (yippie-yeah!) but it seems not to work as expected: https://github.com/opinkerfi/adagios/wiki/Adagios-on-CentOS-7-with-Nagios-4 (@robb link!)

I’m following the evolution of this new chance: I’ll keep you updated, stay tuned! :wink:

The reasons that bring us to choose Nagios with a modern frontend to implement a monitoring solution on NS are quiet simple: we wanted a light, robust, scalable and consolidated monitoring engine that was able to adopt many different monitoring strategies (SNMP,NSCA,NRPE and so on…).
So choices were automatically reduced to only 2 candidates, Zabbix and Nagios, and the second won for different reasons:

  • uses simple text files for the configuration: it’s light and ready-to-go if you want to automate like using Chef or Puppet;
  • it is not resources hungry as competitor;
  • it has a huge number of plugins ready-to-go.
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Thank you @nrauso for the clarification.

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Hi Guys,

Happy new year and thank you for your answers.

It’s a pity! It would have been really nice if we had used the chance to implement an innovative new and easy monitoring program. I can not say that I like NAGIOS nor that it is easy. In my opinion it is totally oversized for this server.

Could i please to pose a question. Who of us has already written a PLUGIN or ADDON?

But! Now we have clarity. Clarity? About what? That this software can read from text files?

The tasks of an administrator become more and more special today. I do not have time for highly complex monitoring programs.
I already said:

Maybe a little bit more. What else could be said, it could also be complicated in Germany to monitor the computers.

What ever.

Greetings Mario

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Hi Mario,
While i agree on the fact that Nagios needs a lot of studying in the beginning, once you’ve grasped its basics it becomes an extremely powerful and versatile tool, you’ll be blown away by the level of customization you can achieve, your imagination is the only limit to what you could monitor

I have tried thruk, op5, opsview, naemon… they’re all pretty much the same, you can’t expect to have a monitoring program to already do all you need it to do, because well… everything you are going to monitor is going to behave differently based on how you configured it and on what parts of it you need to be monitored, and there are so many different products out there that is going to be impossible to maintain a single monitoring suite that covers them all out of the box

The real power of Nagios is in its customization capabilities and plugins, there is plenty of documentation around about pretty much anything you can find in Nagios, Adagios immensely simplifies Nagios configuration and usage, but only once you’ve actually understood how Nagios itself works

About writing new plugins, that too can be time consuming but again, once you’ve understood how plugins work and how they interact with Nagios (exit codes), it becomes really intuitive to make new ones

Moreover, studying how Nagios works also has the added bonus of understanding how the stuff you’re going to monitor exactly works

The Nagios you find in NS, (and thus, adagios) can be already expanded to send you an email when free disk space goes lower than a custom threshold, or send a message to a slack/mattermost channel if an authorized access attempt is found in your logfile, or send a message on whatsapp/SMS if a service running on a server goes down…

If you’d like to dig into the very deep Nagios’ rabbit hole, you can start off by reading how Nagios works here

I would suggest starting off by reading the docs there, you’ll find all you need to start using and customizing Nagios, but it is going to take some time.

Once you’ve got how to monitor something on the same machine Adagios is installed on, you can then proceed to monitor stuff on a remote machine, through NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor)

If i can be of help, feel free to ask and i’ll gladly lend a hand if it’s something that can be done, but please be as specific as possible on what you need to monitor

Cheers

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Dear Mr. Davide Notarpietro

Thank you for the detailed argument. I am quite conscious of what NAGIOS is capable of doing. I fovorize the PARETO principle. (80/20 rule).

But I also understand that we are a team and sometimes we have to agree.

Let’s wait and see who can really use NAGIOS.

Greetings Mario

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That’s a huge explanation Davide, thanks for your sharings. You are really on top of that! :orange_book: