Configuring Nagios

Andreas Ericsson ae at op5.se
Sat Sep 18 12:13:30 CEST 2004


Gerd Müller wrote:
> Am Fr, den 17.09.2004 schrieb Andreas Ericsson um 19:49:
>>
>>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? 
> 

We rolled our own, written on company time. It's opensource but not free 
software (in any sense) I'm afraid.

> 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.  
> 

Enter contract support. We take care of knowing that, so our customers 
don't have to. Thay pay us for having an indepth knowledge that would 
otherwise require months for the average network admin to obtain.

> 
>>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 think you're wrong. While presenting only the possible choices for 
each referencing variable, users usually get a faster understanding of 
the object inter-relationship, and with the relevant help-text only a 
click away (as opposed to googling for it) most of our customers have 
become OP5 flavour Nagios gurus themselves.

> 
>>>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, ... 
> 

95% of the checks in most networks are standard items. Ping, resource 
usage, network service response times, etc. etc. For the more esoteric 
once, you set up one service and then clone it to other hosts by picking 
them off in a multiple selection list. No need for service-logic 
hostgroups any more.

>>
>>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.

Again enter contract support. Some companies have no unix gurus on the 
staff (should be made illegal, if you ask me), others have it but feel 
the workload of tweaking opensource apps to their liking is just too 
heavy. We do this for them and are able to provide several years of 
experience for a fraction of the cost we paid to get it.

> 
> 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.
> 

In short; We take care of that too.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


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