<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Best Practises for a *NIX environment over multiple WAN's</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> Hi There, We monitor a large amount of services for all our customers. We do not have the luxury of all the networks being on the same WAN/LAN infrastructure. A lot of our servers have public IP’s and a lot do not. Typically, we have been monitoring the *NIX servers using a combination of active and passive (active where we can, passive where the server does not have a public IP) What the above creates, is quite a mess and a difficult process to try and explain to all our support agents on how to monitor our customer servers, due to all differences. We are now redoing our monitoring from scratch (using Groundwork) - in an ideal world each server would be accessible via an active check and we could ensure that 99% of all monitoring changes are doing via the Groundwork interface (assuming we run NRPE on each server and have external arguments accepted) - what’s great about this, the junior support engineers could easily make changes via an interface. However, as discussed not all servers are accessible directly, so I’m considering just doing an all passive approach to simplify the process – to install nagios on every server which submits its active checks back via NSCA. The thing I hate about this, is the fact that we have to log on to every server to make a monitoring change, which is what I was trying to avoid. I guess we could make the passive approach a bit better, by making use of something like puppet and version control so we don’t really have to log on to the servers... Before I start this whole project, I would like to know if anyone has any ideas on the “Best way” to do this, any advise would be appreciated. At the moment, I’m steering towards passive for everything and version control. My main goal here is monitoring that works, that is simple to modify moving forward. (KISS methodology) -- Regards, David Jacobson Technical Director SYNAQ (Pty) Ltd Tel: 011 262 3628 Direct: 011 262 3626 Fax: 086 637 8868 Cell: 083 235 0760 Mail: davidj@synaq.com Web: <a href="http://www.synaq.com">http://www.synaq.com</a> Key Fingerprint 8246 FCE1 3C22 7EFB E61B 18DF 6E8B 65E8 BD50 78A1 </BODY> </HTML>