Configuring Nagios

[Harlan Richard C]

What we ended up doing to taking Nagmin and building on to it, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. 99% of what we monitor are different web sites, so we throw a php page together that query out inventory database to grab all the information it needs and then dumps it into the Nagmin database. Our Web admin can not add a new site to Nagios in under a sec, with out causing any errors. Most of these guys are not up on Nagios and do not want to learn, this make it much easer they editing the text Config files. Plus we added new thing like testing out the command before the database is update to make sure there will be no problem. Well my 2 cents anyway

Richard Harlan
Enterprise Infrastructure Shared Services
Application Infrastructure Support
harlanrichardc at johndeere.com
309-765-3225 

-----Original Message-----
From: nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Andreas Ericsson
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2004 05:14 AM
To: Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Configuring Nagios

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


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: YOU BE THE JUDGE. Be one of 170 Project Admins to receive an Apple iPod Mini FREE for your judgement on who ports your project to Linux PPC the best. Sponsored by IBM.
Deadline: Sept. 24. Go here: http://sf.net/ppc_contest.php _______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null





-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: YOU BE THE JUDGE. Be one of 170
Project Admins to receive an Apple iPod Mini FREE for your judgement on
who ports your project to Linux PPC the best. Sponsored by IBM.
Deadline: Sept. 24. Go here: http://sf.net/ppc_contest.php
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null