Freeware IT monitoring tools are used by thousands of organisation worldwide however using them to monitor complex network, server and application installations can be quite a challenge. This blog post takes the basic capabilities of one such tool, Nagios® Core, and shows how you can scale it with Opsview for use in enterprise environments.
Many freeware IT monitoring tools are great but using them to manage complex systems can be a real challenge. It can also be unforgiving on anyone less than expert in configuring the system with mistakes being punished by a complete stop in monitoring activity.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
In hindsight, Opsview would have always had access controls for objects at the role level – since roles also define which parts of the Opsview application you can get to, it would make sense to also put all the host and service objects into this definition.
(In our defence, we wanted to make it as obvious as possible for a contact when you were changing access information.)
The downside of our design decision many years ago is that Opsview administrators who have lots of their users – or contacts in Opsview terms – with the same sort of access and were having to change each user individually. This was painful and error prone if you had 40 “similar” users. Continue reading »
All enterprises depend on reliable servers, network devices and business applications. Any downtime hits your bottom line. To ensure maximum IT performance across your business, you have to identify and resolve problems before they impact the user experience or security of your data.
This post is based on research we’ve undertaken to develop a pilot mash-up style, charting dashboard for our monitoring solution, Opsview Enterprise. However the concepts we discuss could be used when building a dashboard that displays information from many other enterprise solutions. The assumption we make is that the reader is familiar with Java and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). For more information about GWT and the other libraries used in this blog please see the Resources section at the end. Continue reading »
Cfengine is one of the most powerful tools available for automating Linux and Unix system administration. Unlike shell or perl scripts cfengine allows you to describe the desired state of the system rather than specifying how to perform each operation. Because of this cfengine scripts are concise and simple to create.
Cfengine is designed to act as part of a ‘computer immune system’ with capabilities including:
- Ensuring correct file and directory permissions
- Backing up, archiving and synching of data
- Tidying the filesystem and removal of obselete files
- Management of NFS mounts
- Anomaly detection – similar to tripwire
- Automated editing of system configuration
- Process management
Cfengine is designed to be centrally managed greatly simplifying the task of administering multiple systems.
At Altinity we use Cfengine for the following tasks:
- Initial configuration of hosts
- Ensuring system integrity
- Automating routine admin tasks
- Automated error recovery (restarting processes, removing lock files, etc).
We’ll be making sample scripts available on this site shortly.
Links
Cfengine home – http://www.cfengine.org/
Cfengine downloads – http://www.cfengine.org/mirrors.html
Cfengine documentation – http://www.cfengine.org/documentation.phtml
Cfengine overview by Æleen Frisch – http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/05/29/essentialsysadmin.html
Opsview is a leading Open Source application and network monitoring suite. Labs is where our engineers discuss new projects, new approaches and new frameworks they’re using.
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