Network Monitoring Made Easy

This open source solution provides a number of open source monitoring tools bundled into one thus making installation easier and your network mangement a breeze

Friday, May 01, 2009

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The open source world has lots of tools for doing different network monitoring tasks. For example, we install Nagios for event handling and notification, RRDtool for data collection and management, etc. This requires one to install multiple tools on a system, which can be quite troublesome. GroundWork offers a completely unique solution to this issue. It combines the best open source monitoring and reporting solutions into a single package. It includes Nagios, RRDTool, BIRT for ad-hoc reporting, SNMP, etc.

There are various options available for you to deploy this solution. GroundWork is available in 32 and 64 bit installable versions and is also available as a virtual appliance for VMWare. In case you don't want dedicated hardware for this solution, then the second option is best for you. The minimum hardware requirement for a professional setup is, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, 2 CPU 3GHz or better, RHEL 4 or CentOS 4 (or above).

Features and how tos
Once GroundWork appliance is up and running, open its configuration page on any web browser and login using username as 'admin' and password as 'password'. It is based on CentOS 5, so incase you need the root credentials then the password for that is 'opensource'.

User Management
Let's start by creating a new user first , who can monitor all the necessary activity on your network. For this, click on the main menu icon found on the top left corner and then click on 'Administration'. Click on 'Add a new user' link provided on the right panel. Provide the necessary details, such as username, password, authentication mode, etc and then click on 'Finish'.

With Range and Filter option, it becomes easier to include or exclude certain IPs from the discovery, thus saving a lot of time.

Auto Discovery
Next is the auto discovery option which lets you discover all devices that are connected to your networ, like , PCs, switches, DSL routers, etc. For this, click on the main menu icon and then click on the auto discovery option. For discovery of devices, GroundWork uses Nmap, TC,P and SNMP. You'll need to provide the range of IP addresses you want to discover on your network. You can also exclude certain IPs. For this, specify the IP and just select Exclude from the 'Type' drop down option. Once you have specified the IP address range, click on 'add range/filter' button and then on 'Go' button. Next it warns the network admin that the discovery option might have an adverse impact on the network. Hence it is better to run the discovery when the load on the network is minimum. Check the accept check box and click on 'Go'. Once the scan is complete, click on 'Commit'.

If after some time there is a new host on the network, then running the discovery option wouldn't be a good idea. The 'add new host' option would be better here. For adding a new host manually, navigate to main menu > configuration and then click on 'Configuration'. Now click on host wizard link provided on the left panel. Provide the necessary information about the host, such as hostname, address, profile and then click on 'Next'. Specify the host template, which stores some common object properties and click on 'Next'.

The Tools option provides a very friendly UI, which helps you easily figure out the healthy and unhealthy machines on the network.	In the Status option, GroundWork lets you view the summary of all hosts on your workgroup in one glance, such as number of hosts that are in critical state.

Provide the host group that the host belongs to and click on 'Next'. Now select the service you want upon that host and click on 'add to list' button. You can also add service profile. Now click on 'Next' and then on 'Save as profile'. If you want to add more such hosts, then click on 'Continue'. For adding a new group, expand the host group node and then click on 'new' link. Provide the host name, alias, add the member into the group, select the appropriate contact group and then click on 'Add'.

Bookshelf
Bookshelf is a good option provided to the system network administrators.

It is a complete help book, explaining each and every feature elaborately. So in case you are finding some problem while configuring GroundWork then simply visit this section. GroundWork uses Nagios for service and network monitoring.

Using Nagios
For accessing Nagios, navigate to main menu and click on 'Nagios'. This feature provides a comprehensive view of hosts that reside in the network. It shows you how many numbers of hosts are down, number of host having critical problem, etc.

Further, it also tells you the issues faced by services, that are running on the host machine. Using this, you can also view logs of notifications, history of hosts, etc. It also shows you status details of all the hosts, like services running on them on a single window.

With the help of Report option, you can create custom reports, to see details about the total number of warnings, in a particular period of time. It also lets you show the managed hosts, groups and services per day.

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