Opsview gives you lots of standard options for receiving status notifications, but with a bit of custom scripting you can also get status messages from Opsview and post them to a Twitter account. This could be useful if you want to keep all your status messages in one place with a timeline. Plus you can also set up an account for other members of your team to follow so they can also see the updates. However it’s probably best that the Twitter account is kept within your organisation unless you want the world to see the status of your servers!

This article tells you how to configure Opsview to send messages to Twitter. For configuring this you need to have access to the shell of your Opsview server.

To access Twitter from Opsview, you’ll need to install Tweepy. Tweepy is a Python library for accessing the Twitter API. It requires Python 2.5 or later. If you need to install Python 2.6 you can follow the instructions on this blog.

# wget http://dagobah.ftphosting.net/yum/smartfile.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/smartfile.repo

Then you can use YUM to install python26 package:

# yum install python26 python26-distribute

To get a list of installed packages, do:

# yum list *python26* | grep -i installed

Installed Packages
python26.x86_64             2.6.5-6.el5   installed
python26-distribute.noarch  0.6.10-4.el5  installed
python26-libs.x86_64        2.6.5-6.el5   installed

Install Tweepy

/usr/bin/easy_install-2.6 tweepy

Next you’ll need to authenticate Twitter from the command line. This blog tells you how.

At this point you’ll need to create a new Twitter account which will be used to post the notifications.

Make sure you enable Tweet Privacy under Settings, in the Twitter account, so that posts are not made public (unless you want them to be!)

After creating the Twitter account, you’ll need to register a new client app with Twitter.

Select “Connect the app to your Twitter account” with a minor change in the first line.. write python26 instead of python

#!/usr/bin/env python26

Import tweepy

CONSUMER_KEY = 'paste your Consumer Key here'
CONSUMER_SECRET = 'paste your Consumer Secret here'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
print 'Please authorize: ' + auth_url
verifier = raw_input('PIN: ').strip()
auth.get_access_token(verifier)
print "ACCESS_KEY = '%s'" % auth.access_token.key
print "ACCESS_SECRET = '%s'" % auth.access_token.secret

Again, in  “Create the command line script”, change to python26. Don’t forget to add your own keys.

#!/usr/bin/env python26

import sys
import tweepy

CONSUMER_KEY = 'paste your Consumer Key here'
CONSUMER_SECRET = 'paste your Consumer Secret here'
ACCESS_KEY = 'paste your Access Key here'
ACCESS_SECRET = 'paste your Access Secret here'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
auth.set_access_token(ACCESS_KEY, ACCESS_SECRET)
api = tweepy.API(auth)
api.update_status(sys.argv[1])

Then “Send a test tweet from the command line” and if the test is successful, do the following:

1.	Move the script to /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/.

(call the script ‘connect_twitter’, hence script is at /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/connect_twitter)

2.	chown nagios:nagios /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/connect_twitter
3.	chmod +x /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/connect_twitter

Create another script to be used by Opsview:

/usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/notify-by-twitter

The script:

dt=`date '+%H:%M %d%b%y'`
if [ -n "$NAGIOS_SERVICEDESC" ]
then
msg=`echo @$NAGIOS__CONTACTTWITTERID Time:$dt. $NAGIOS_SERVICEDESC @ $NAGIOS_HOSTNAME,$NAGIOS_HOSTADDRESS is $NAGIOS_SERVICESTATE. $NAGIOS_SERVICEOUTPUT | cut -c 0-140`
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/connect_twitter "$msg"
unset msg
else
msg=`echo @$NAGIOS__CONTACTTWITTERID Time:$dt. $NAGIOS_HOSTNAME,$NAGIOS_HOSTADDRESS is $NAGIOS_HOSTSTATE. $NAGIOS_HOSTOUTPUT| cut -c 0-140`
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/connect_twitter "$msg"
unset msg
fi

Again,

chown nagios:nagios /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/notify-by-twitter
chmod +x /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notifications/notify-by-twitter

Log in to Opsview as a user with admin privileges.

Go to Advanced then Notification Methods from the drop down menu.

On the top right, click Actions and then Create new Notification Method as following:

Next, go to Configuration on the Opsview Menu bar, then Contacts. Click on the contact you want to set Twitter alerts for. Click the Notifications button. Add your Twitter ID (this ID will receive the Tweets).

Click on Submit and edit Notification Profiles.

Click Actions, and create new Notification Profile for user.

Create the profile and submit changes.

Reload your configuration (click on Configuration Status, top right, then Reload Configuration).

Reboot one of your servers or stop a service which is added in Opsview. Note that Twitter allows 250 direct messages per day, do not cross this limit as tweets won’t come in after you exceed this number.

The Tweets should now start coming in!

Try this out for yourself by downloading Opsview Community edition and get our latest tips and updates by following us on Twitter!

This post outlines how to get SNMP traps from ESX hosts and monitor them in Opsview. The first part deals with configuring SNMP traps to get them working correctly with ESX hosts, part 2 tells you how to monitor them with Opsview.

The following steps worked on ESX 4.1. Depending on versions you may have different results. For simplicity, I used 10.0.0.1 as IP for my ESX host, and 10.0.0.99 for my SNMP trap handler.

1. Download and install the vSphere CLI. Keep in mind that you need an account to access it. Check BugMeNot if you’re not in the mood for registering.

The vSphere CLI will give you a host of useful tools to control your ESX environment with without having to resport to SSH or console access.

2. Check if you already have an active SNMP agent on your host with the following command:

vicfg-snmp --show --server 10.0.0.1

3. If no traps are configured (why would you even be reading this if they were?). Add your SNMP target like this (By default, vicfg-snmp.pl is located in the C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin directory):

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 -t 10.0.0.99@162/communitystring

4. Enable the SNMP service:

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 --enable

5. Check that you have a working configuration by using the –show command like this:

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 --show

Your output should look something like this:

Current SNMP agent settings: Enabled : 1 UDP port : 162 Communities : communitystring Notification targets : 10.0.0.99@162/communitystring

6. If you’d like, you can send a test trap to your target to make sure you’re on the right path. If you’re just testing, you can send them to your own client PC. I use the freeware application SNMP Trap Watcher for this.

Sending the following command through the vSphere CLI will generate a Warm Start trap:

vicfg-snmp.pl --server 10.0.0.1 --username root --password qwerty1234 --test

You should receive a report in your trap watcher:

If you’re not getting anything, chances are the ESX firewall isn’t allowing SNMP traffic. I had to allow this using the vSphere Client (connect to the ESX server, not a vCenter host). Click the tab “Configuration”, and select “Security Profile” in the menu on your left. Click “Properties” and enable SNMP:

The outgoing port will be the one you configured when you added a trap handler in step 4.

That’s it. You have an ESX host sending SNMP traps properly. Now all you need to do is get your monitoring software to understand what it’s saying. We’ll cover that in the next post.

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.

To diagnose reliability and performance problems on complex networks you need visibility of system events combined with the ability to spot trends and exceptions. For example, without proactive IT monitoring how can you tell whether poor application performance is related to network congestion, database performance or a high number of users?

Monitoring network events as they happen!

Powerful graphing tools

Here are five reasons why you need better network and application visibility:

1.    To maximise your return on network investments for business application delivery All businesses invest heavily in setting up and maintaining their IT infrastructure whether it be physical, virtualised or in the Cloud. Effective capacity planning allows you to target your spending wisely and track your return on investment. IT monitoring gives you instant access to the data you need for trend analysis and provides data warehouse capability suitable for enterprise reporting and capacity planning.

2.    To anticipate and resolve issues before they’re problems Knowing when there is a problem with your IT systems can be useful but anticipating problems before they occur is the real value of system monitoring. IT monitoring gives you the visibility needed to spot performance and capacity issues before they have an impact on your systems. It can also process alarms from network, storage, power and cooling infrastructure ensuring you can mitigate the effects of failing hardware.

3.    Make your staff more effective The biggest asset for any business is its staff, also usually this is the biggest cost. Adoption of effective IT monitoring tools shifts the focus of your staff from fire-fighting to forward-planning. A project-based approach is more time efficient and allows you to focus the talents of your staff more effectively.

4.    To ensure quality and service levels Maintaining quality of service requires visibility. Performance issues can remain hidden to the business while quietly eroding the confidence of customers and partners. IT monitoring exposes current problems and gives you the tools for long terms analysis and reporting. It provides service level reporting, providing clear evidence that you’re meeting the required service levels.

5.    Move things forward! System monitoring is the cornerstone of IT management best practice. By adopting IT monitoring you’re making immediate efficiency gains and you’re laying the foundation for even greater levels of automation, scalability and resiliency.