Questions about Status Map

[Frost, Mark {PBG}]

OK, so this is starting to make some sense to me.  The reason my status
map looks like crap is because every host and service I own has the
nagios server as its parent.

So now I'm trying to use traceroute to determine the network topology
which leads me to my next question.  I've seen the nagios docs that talk
about determining host reachability.  It shows distinct routers and
switches with (presumably) a single IP.  How do people represent
routers/switches that have different IPs depending on the network their
on?  I mean, yes, it is technically one physical piece of hardware, but
it's separate interfaces.  So for example

-------------------
|  Nagios Server  |
-------------------
         | 1.2.3.4
         |
 1.2.3.1 |
-----------------
|    Router     |
-----------------
 4.5.6.1 |
         |
         | 4.5.6.7
-----------------
|    Host A     |
-----------------


Technically, 1.2.3.1 and 4.5.6.1 both are IPs for the same router.  In
theory, pinging 1.2.3.1 indicates that the box is up.  However, it
doesn't guarantee that the interface to Host A's network is up.

As I see it you could either ignore one or the other of the interfaces
"on the way" to Host A, or you could pretend that each IP on the switch
is a separate host.  So Host A has a parent of 4.5.6.1 which has a
parent of 1.2.3.1.  I would imagine that this method (multiple host
definitions for a single router box) is the best way.

How do most people handle this kind of thing?

thanks

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Jim
Avery
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 1:47 PM
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Questions about Status Map

On 25/04/07, Frost, Mark {PBG} <mark.frost1 at pepsi.com> wrote:
> Thanks, Jim.
>
> I tried out Nexsm last night and found that it gave me a huge,
unordered
> picture of all my hosts.

You need the parent relationships for Nexsm to work, and with that
many hosts you may need to spend a little while dragging hosts around
to make the map look meaningful.  Once you've dragged the hosts to
where you want them you should be able to save the Nexsm map.  Without
those parent relationships defined it's pretty pointless!

> Perhaps I don't fully understand the parent relationship stuff.
That's
> most for routers and switches which we don't monitor (nor really care
> about) -- that's for other teams that are completely disassociated
with
> ours.

Even if they're not your responsibility it's worth putting routers in
to your Nagios configuration.  You don't need to do anything more with
them than ping them to make sure they're alive.  It helps in making
sense of your map and greatly helps in ensuring that Nagios won't send
you dozens of alerts when a single router or lan/wan link goes down.

> My understanding is that you setup parent relationships between
> host entitities (including switches and routers) and for what we
> monitor, there are none.

Put the routers in and there will be.  The parent relationships are
all about what nodes are in-between your Nagios system and the host
you are monitoring.  I don't have responsibility for routers - I still
ping them from Nagios but have Nagios configured so that it won't
alert for routers 'down' - only hosts.

> I'll have a look at nagiosmap.

By all means do, but again if you don't have some parent relationships
defined, your 350 hosts will all appear to be connected to the one
parent like the petals of a daisy.

Cheers,

Jim

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