Help with Monitoring Remote Networks

[Cook, Garry]

If you didn't get a response to the first message that you posted to the
list, it's probably a good indication that your question was phrased in
such a way that most people found it too difficult to answer. I know I
did. Next time try to at least rephrase the question and add some more
details, most of the people on this list are very helpful, although I
doubt that they have time to both decipher/translate and answer
questions.

David Barnett wrote:
> I am from a consulting company that monitors clients' networks and
> troubleshoots them. I would like to be able to use nagios to monitor
> the networks better, but I am having a problem determining if nagios
The first two sentences at http://nagios.org should answer this question
for you.
"What is Nagios? An open source host, service and network monitoring
program."
Sounds like it would be perfect for your company.


> is right for me.  Many of our clients have local networks behind
> their routers, 
Every router has a local network behind it. To you it may appear remote,
but to the router it is local. Can you be more specific? I'm going to
guess that you meant 'private networks', maybe using NAT on the
firewall?
If this is the case, then the rest of your answers will probably depend
upon what type of access your clients will give you. If they will allow
you to change the firewall rulebase, or request specific changes, you'll
probably be OK. 


> and I would like to monitor each of the workstations that are behind
the router as well as the router itself.  Can this be
> done in nagios?
I've been using Nagios for a few years now. So far I haven't come across
any devices that I needed to monitor that could not be monitored using
Nagios. That's not to say that there aren't some out there, there may
be. I figure, if it has an IP address, I can use Nagios to monitor it.
Perhaps a better questions would be to ask your clients "Will you allow
me to do this with Nagios?"
I use NRPE for monitoring unix servers and NSClient for Windows. I
believe that NSCA may be designed to send check results to the
monitoring server, if the monitoring server cannot query a device
directly. If this statement is true, then it may solve the issue that I
think you were referring to earlier (monitoring local networks, can it
be done?). I haven't yet used NSCA, so I can't comment much further on
that.


> Can I set it up so a nsca program sits on each clients' computer and
listens for commands from my server?  My
>From what I have read about NSCA, at
http://www.nagios.org/download/extras.php, I believe the answer to this
question is no. However, it appears as though you may be able to set up
the send_nsca utility on each clients computer to SEND commands to your
Nagios server. These would be accepted as 'Passive Checks', which means
that Nagios does not 'actively' check the services, but receives state
information based on service checks done locally.


> understanding is that the router would not know which of the
> workstations on the local network behind it should be sent the nsca
> command.  I tried looking it up in the documentation, but could not
> find the specific answer I was looking for.  Thank you in advance.   
I'm not sure what documentation you looked at, but I would start with
the docs at http://www.nagios.org, as well as the FAQs at
http://www.nagios.org/faqs/. Also, you may want to download NSCA and
read any docs that come with it.

HTH

Garry W. Cook, CCNA
Network Infrastructure Manager
MACTEC, Inc. - http://www.mactec.com/
303.308.6228 (Office) - 720.220.1862 (Mobile)


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