Configuring Nagios

[Gerd Müller]

Am Fr, den 17.09.2004 schrieb Andreas Ericsson um 19:49:
> Gerd Müller wrote:
> > Am Fr, den 17.09.2004 schrieb Mohr James um 15:38:
> > 
> >>Hi All!
> >>
> >>Is there a GUI to configure Nagios? Is there any auto discovery?  Thanks in advance.
> > 
> > 
> > My preferred way to configure nagios is to use something like vi. I don't like the
> > guis. It takes much longer to configure nagios via web interface than via a simple
> > editor.
> 
> That depends on the app doing the configuration, wouldn't you say? I 
> myself, having deployed Nagios in about 20 corporate networks of varying 
> size find it to be the exact opposite.

Maybe you found a better (and working) gui than me. What are you using?
Does it support distributed monitoring by any chance? 

My experience tells me that after editing the configfiles by hand the
users know what they are doing whereas the webgui users are often do not
understand what's behind the config, how nagios works and how powerfull
nagios and features are.  

> Also, the learning curve can be reduced to near nothingness with 
> competent coding. This raises the user availability and greatly reduces 
> the effort/beneficiary-ratio for the program author (Ethan). After all, 
> the greatest program in the world is worthless if noone uses it.

That's true for beginners. They will get very soon a working config and
will feel happy about their success. But as I already wrote they only
know very little about nagios at all. 

> > I also don't like any auto discovery. Such programs normaly create massiv
> > config files without any logical structure inside and without any knowledge of
> > wise critical/warning values.
> 
> I'm not sure what programs you've used, but we've tweaked the default 
> values over a period of two years. All of our customers find them to be 
> quite perfect for near enough 100% of their hosts.

Realy? I have a diffrent experience. My customers' config files always
have to be heavy customized. But your a right for standard things like
cpu load, load on a leased line, ... 

> > This will cause you massiv work afterwards if you
> > want to change details of your config and prevent useless alert-mailstorms.
> 
> But having one or two people familiar with the rather complex syntax and 
> relationship scheme of Nagios makes the workload very heavy for those. 
> And what happens when the precious few who knows how to configure the 
> company network monitoring tool quits their jobs?

Monitoring your it-infrastruce (not only the used space on harddiscs ;-)
) isn't an easy job it needs a lot of knowledge of various technics and
so if such a person is leaving the successor should have also a lot of
knowledge and with all these background nagios won't be very hard to
understand. And as all managers know if a person is the only one how
knows about a special tasks (e.g. the nagios config) and doesn't share
his knowledge with other employees this person will have to be fired!
How will clients survive if the nagios admin is on holiday? ;-)

> 
> > So  I would suggest first plan and oriented your configuration similar to 
> your logical
> > setup and then use excessive templates and groups.
> 
> A wise suggestion no matter what tool is used for configuration.
> 
> > That will save you much more  time than using guis and autodetection.
> > 
> 
> For a small network, maybe. For a medium or large (100+ hosts), not a 
> chance. When the editor fellows are done entering hostnames, aliases and 
> addresses the webconfig crew will have an adequate and working 
> configuration up and running.

Again I disagree with you ;-). Costumers with more than 100+ hosts (and
we installed nagios/netsaint over the last few years at a lot of
companies already on networks with over 100 hosts - up to 3000 hosts)
have in most cases very structured networks which makes it relative
simple to role out nagios with only a few hostgroups/templates. There
enviroment (firewalls, weak leased lines, ...) makes it compilcated. But
you are right if the infrastructure is a mess nagios configuration won't
be an easy job even if you are using a web interface. But than they
should start first with their infrastructure and not with nagios.

In a nutshell nagios guis are good for starting and geting successfull
runing a basci config very soon. But if you want to use nagios with all
it's features you have to do manual work and of course as a matter of
importance plan your doing very well in advance.

-- 
Gerd Mueller <gmueller at netways.de>
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