#opsview

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Setting up distributed monitoring in mission critical production environments is a complex task; configuration can be challenging and mistakes costly. Opsview Enterprise edition and Opsview Syncmaster module make deploying an enterprise monitoring system easy and reduce the risks associated with migrating configuration objects from development to production environments. Here’s how:

1. Get everything done in one place

Opsview’s configuration User Interface makes it quick and easy to get things done. Any configuration you need to make is carried out in one place, no jumping between screens or applications required. All the complex processing is kept 'under the hood' so you can focus on what’s important to you – configuring your monitoring environment the way you want it.

2. Maintain consistent configurations with host templates

Templates in Opsview can help you maintain consistent monitoring configurations throughout your system. Pre-defined templates are included for many hardware, operating systems and applications such as Cisco kit, Drupal CMS or the MySQL database. Any changes you make to a template will affect the whole configuration, giving you a quick way to make consistent, controlled changes to your distributed monitoring system.

3. Reduce configuration errors with cloning

In Opsview you can quickly configure identical objects by using the clone function. In large environments chances are you will have lots of identical pieces of equipment such as network devices. Rather than having to manually enter configuration information for each one you can simply clone an existing device as many times as you need, saving time and reducing errors.

4. Speed up configurations with embedded SNMP capabilities

Opsview’s embedded SNMP polling and trapping detects SNMP interfaces so you don’t have to. This takes away much of the time consuming configuration involved with a complex distributed monitoring system and reduces the chances of input errors which could, in some other systems, cause a malfunction.

5. Manage complex configurations with attributes

Attributes In Opsview help you maintain checks on complex configurations. Instead of configuring service checks for individual hosts you can create one check and use attributes to carry out checks on each host. For example you might want a check on VMhosts which could be running 20 or 30 virtual machines. With attributes you can set up one service check on a guest VM and use attributes to reference all the virtual machines on the host. Find out more about setting up attributes in Opsview.

6. Get Notified

Notification profiles help you keep on top of your distributed monitoring by making sure your team get the notifications they need when they need them. You can decide who gets notified, why they get notified and how. For example you can set up your profile to get e-mail notifications during normal working hours if your system is in a warning state, but for more critical notifications, such as a system outage, an SMS can be sent to an onsite-engineer.

7. Get industrial strength change management with Opsview Syncmaster

Opsview Syncmaster module helps you follow change management procedures and takes away the risk of errors caused by untested system configurations. With Opsview Syncmaster you eliminate costly downtime and speed up system configuration, all from one single point of control.

8. View status and configure hosts

Start off by using Opsview Syncmaster to see which hosts are being monitored. From the Opsview Syncmaster interface you can see detailed summary information about your monitored systems, such as current status, which slave servers are configured for monitoring, if configurations are up to date or even the performance latency of the monitoring system. From here you can also directly access the configuration UI of each host.

9. Easily move objects

Opsview Syncmaster enables you to easily move objects between environments, whether on-premise, off-site, or virtualised, by dragging and dropping from one environment to another, e.g. drag a slave between slave clusters or drag hosts between host groups.

10. Synchronise objects between servers and safely deploy

One of the key strengths of Opsview Syncmaster is the ability to synchronise objects between servers. You can synchronise one or multiple objects, either by using an existing profile or by creating a new one. For example you may have created a new user and want to synchronise the user across all systems or to migrate an application in a test environment across to production. Simply select the source system and the target system and decide which configuration object(s) you want to synchronise. Opsview Syncmaster then safely migrates the chosen settings between environments with just a click of a mouse.

So you followed the steps in the previous post about enabling SNMP traps on ESX4. Now you probably want to pick those up by something useful. Opsview can be configured to handle the traps quite easily. Just follow the steps below and your server will be listening to those pesky traps. After that, you’ll need to write a couple of service check handlers in Opsview to make sense of the traps. More on that later. This post is just about picking them up.

This was done on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server. The steps are probably the same on Debian systems. 1. Make sure you have snmpd installed. If you don’t, install it! Easy as pie.

aptitude install snmpd

2. Edit /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and uncomment “master agentx”. 3. Edit /etc/default/snmpd (or /etc/snmp/snmptrapd.conf on newer systems):

TRAPDRUN=yes TRAPDOPTS='-t -m ALL -M /usr/share/snmp/mibs:/usr/local/nagios/snmp/load -p /var/run/snmptrapd.pid' SNMPDOPTS='-u nagios -Lsd -Lf /dev/null -p/var/run/snmpd.pid'

4. Edit /etc/snmp/snmptrapd.conf and add the following lines:

traphandle default /usr/local/nagios/bin/snmptrap2nagios disableAuthorization yes

Please note that this will make the server listen to and handle any SNMP traps it receives, regardless of source. 5. Restart snmpd and snmptrapd:

/etc/init.d/snmpd restart

6. Edit the /etc/sudoers file to allow Opsview to restart snmpd and snmptrapd:

nagios ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/local/nagios/bin/snmpd reload

7. Test the permissions:

su - nagios sudo /usr/local/nagios/bin/snmpd reload

8. Exit back to the root user and restart opsview-web:

/etc/init.d/opsview-web restart

That’s all. Opsview should now be able to handle traps sent to it.

About the Author

Marcus Vejneke holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering and has worked in IT for almost 14 years. Marcus lives in Sweden and works as Sysadmin.

Legal Disclaimer

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 -t10.0.0.99@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 later this week.

About the Author

Marcus Vejneke holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering and has worked in IT for almost 14 years. Marcus lives in Sweden and works as Sysadmin.

Legal Disclaimer

Nagios® is a great IT monitoring tool but using it 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. Opsview adds a human layer to the Nagios® management engine to make it a whole lot easier and more efficient.

Here’s 10 ways how...

Distributed monitoring

Opsview takes the complexities of Nagios and makes distributed monitoring simple. All management is performed on a single master server and communication with slaves is handled by Opsview's middleware layer. Provision is included for geographically diverse monitoring and to cope with potentially unreliable WAN connections between servers.

Host attributes

A feature you won’t find in Nagios , host attributes help simplify configurations by allowing you to create multiple services based on a set of pre-defined attributes. You can assign one or many attributes to a host and set service checks to use the attributes for a host to then create multiple services for monitoring.

Keywords

Opsview’s keyword function gives you a flexible way of grouping hosts and services. You can tag devices, business processes and applications giving you a convenient way of seeing the status of the groups, e.g. critical IT systems, network circuits or business users and customers.

Cloning capability

Chances are when you’re configuring or adding devices and services to your network many of them will be quite similar. To save time you can simply choose to clone an existing device or service monitored with Opsview and add it to the network. Try doing that in Nagios!

SNMP discovery

Nagios provides support for SNMP via its plugin project, but it doesn’t provide support for processing SNMP traps. Opsview does this automatically. A powerful processing engine accepts incoming traps, analyses the data and then decides how they should be processed. In-built SNMP discovery also means SNMP objects can be detected and monitored with ease without the need for human intervention.

Notification profiles

Opsview helps you avoid information overload by easily creating complex business rules that define who gets alerts, how they get them and why. Combined with the Opsview service desk module you get a powerful notification tool that helps speed up mean time to repair and streamline workflows.

Configuration UI

Configuring and maintaining a system with Nagios can become difficult the bigger and more complex the monitoring environment gets. Opsview’s configuration UI means you don’t need to be a Nagios expert to get your monitoring up and running. All the software processes are kept ‘under the hood’ and presented via an intuitive interface so you can see the information that makes a difference to your business without getting caught up with software.

APIs for Automation

Opsview includes automated APIs for configuration, monitoring and notification which makes system set-up pain-free and scaling simple. The APIs also make integrating with other IT Management tools easy.

SLA reporting

Opsview’s Reports Module can automatically generate custom reports in line with business requirements. If you have to produce regular reports for your management or customers, this module will save you hours by generating the reports you need when you need them. The reports can be sent out automatically on email in PDF, HTML, Excel, ODT or XML to your chosen distribution list.

Service desk integration

When you integrate your service desk with Opsview you get a powerful tool for automating incident reporting. Tickets can be created in your system based on alerts generated by Opsview, saving time and freeing up resources. Out of-the-box support is included for Service-Now.com, Bestpractical’s Request Tracker and Atlassian JIRA.