How to Remotely Manage your IT Infrastructure

Continued from page: 3

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Nagios

Nagios is a free Web-based monitoring software for Linux. It keeps a tab on your system and network services and sends alerts through e-mail in case of over-use of resources or errors.

It also informs when the process improves. You can track about 50 different services, including HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, POP3, PING, processor load and disk usage. The software is a little difficult to configure, but it's worth the labor.

Installing Nagios
You need a Linux machine with a C Compiler to install Nagios. To use the Web interface, you need a Web server (preferably Apache) and gd library 1.6.3 or higher. We used Red Hat Linux 8.0 and Apache 2.0.40 for it. To start the installation, download and untar the following two files:

#tar -zxvf nagios-2.0.tar.gz
#tar -zxvf nagiosplug-1.3.1.tar.gz

from the links- 'http://prdownloads.sourceforge. net/nagios/nagios-2.4.tar.gz?download' and 'http:// dag.wieers.com/packages/nagios-plugins/nagios-plugins-1.3.1-10.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm'.
This will create two new directories-nagios-1.0 and nagiosplug-1.3-containing the core installation components and the installer for executable binary commands, respectively. You'll need to make a separate directory to install Nagios. By default the configuration file looks for a Nagios directory in /usr/local. So, create one as follows:

#mkdir /usr/local/nagios

The Nagios configuration file also searches for a default Nagios user. So, add one as follows:

#adduser nagios

Set the password by running 'passwd' command.
Now go to nagios-1.0 and nagiosplug-1.3 directories and issue the following commands in each:

#./configure
#make all
#make install

This will install the Nagios core and the command files. At this moment, Nagios doesn't have any script files from where it can take information about hosts and services. You must, therefore, create the configuration files. The easiest way is to install the sample config files by running the following command from your nagios-1.0 directory:

#make install-config

Go to /usr/local/nagios/etc directory and you'll find all the sample configuration files. Rename them by removing the –sample at the end of each as follows:

#mv filename.cfg-sample filename.cfg.

Adding hosts
Nagios is now ready to start monitoring hosts, so you must now add them. To do that, open the hosts.cfg file from /usr/local/nagios/etc directory and add the following to it:

define host{
host_name PCQLabs
alias Labs Server
address 192.168.1.102
check_command check-host-alive
max_check_attempts 10
notification_interval 480
notification_period 24x7
notification_options d,u,r
}

Here, host_name is the computer name, alias is the description and address is the IP address of the machine that will be monitored. All the information that's filled up is from our test setup, so you must replace it with similar information from your setup. You can add as many hosts as you want and group them according to the way you want to manage them. To add a host to a group, open the hostgroups.cfg file and add the following entries.

define hostgroup{
hostgroup_
name Labsgroup
alias PCQuest
contact_groups linuxadmins
members PCQlabs,member2
}
D

Here, hostgroup_name is the name of the group, alias is the description, members are hosts which are members of this group and contact_groups is the the group of Admins who will receive the alerts.

Alert staff
Next, give the contact information of people who will recive all the alerts. Go to contacts.cfg, and by default you will find an entry for the user Nagios as follows.

define contact{
contact_name nagios
alias Nagios Admin
service_notification_period 24x7
host_notification_period 24x7
service_notification_
options w,u,c,r
host_notification_options d,u,r
service_notification_commands notify-by-email,notify-by- epager
host_notification_commands host-notify-by-email email root@localhost.localdomain
}

Besides this, you can modify or create additional users and create and assign different groups to them. To add this contact to a contact group, for instance, go to contactgroups.cfg and add these lines to it:

define contactgroup{
contactgroup_
name pcq-admins
alias PCQuest
Administrators members
nagios, root
}

Configure Web interface
To do this, first create an alias for the CGIs. By default, the Nagios configuration script searches for it in http://yourmachine/nagios/ cgi-bin/ directory. So, just add the following lines in your httpd.conf file:

ScriptAlias /nagios/cgi-bin/ /usr/local/nagios/sbin/

AllowOverride AuthConfig
Options ExecCGI
Allow from all
Order allow,deny

Next create an alias for the HTML files by adding the following lines:

Alias /nagios/ /usr/local/nagios/share/

Options None
AllowOverride AuthConfig
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

Your Web server is also ready now. Next, we'll set up the alerting mechanism. Open the services.cfg, and you'll find something like this

define service{
host_name DLSB
service_description PING is_volatile 0
check_period 24x7
max_check_attempts 3
normal_check_interval 5 retry_check_interval 1 contact_groups pcq-admins
notification_interval 120
notification_period 24x7
notification_options w,u,c,r check_command check_ping!
100.0,20%! 500. 0,60%
}

Here host_name is the name of the host on which the service will run, service_description is the description of the service and check_command contains the comands located in the /usr/local/nagios/libexec directory. These commands are used with different switches seperated by a ! mark. You can know more about these commands by running them with -h in the command prompt.

Start monitoring
You are now ready to start Nagios. Just restart the Web server and run the following command from /usr/local/nagios/bin directory:

#./nagios ../etc/nagios.cfg

Open your favorite Web browser and type the following address. “http://yourmachine/nagios/index. html”where yourmachine is the name or the IP address of your Nagios server.Everything on the Web interface is self-evident. Just click on the various menu items on the left to view different kinds of information about the hosts being monitored.

HP OpenView NNM

The Network Node Manager Advanced Edition is a network monitoring software designed to manage complex switched enterprise networks and to quickly pin-point problems through its sophisticated root cause analysis facility. Its key features include discovering and understanding your physical network, virtual network services, and the complex relationships between them; assessing the impact of problems with intelligent diagnostics for a networks' root-cause analysis and service state determination; increase efficiency of the network through built-in intelligence, targeted polling and automated actions. It can be expanded to manage additional services and technologies simply by adding more plug-ins. The software is very easy to setup out of the box.

How to setup
To setup HP OpenView Network Node Manager for Windows, you need at least Windows 2000 with the latest services pack or even WinXP SP2 with IIS. Make sure that the machine has a fixed IP and default gateway of your network subnet and also gives the DNS address and DNS suffix to the machine. Plus, also check that the virtual memory of the machine should not be anything less than 512 MB. The machine should have Java run time installed and be SNMP enabled. After you've installed OpenView on it, as per your requirement, you can check whether the NNM services have started or not from Start>Programs>HP OpenView> Network Node Manager Admin>NNM Service Status. Keep NNM running on your network for some time to automatically discover all your network devices. The actual time depends upon the size of your network. The software gives you two types of interfaces to access-Web based and console based. Both have a neat interface and are very easy to navigate. The browser interface can be accessed from http://hostname/ OvCgi/ovlaunch.exe. Network Node Manager automatically discovers and monitors complex switched networks and virtual network services in various environments, ranging from small office networks with only a few devices to very large networks with hundreds of thousands of devices.

HP OpenView Network Node Manager draws the layout of your network which includes switches, routers and nodes, and shows real time status of the network

The software gives you graphical representation of your network, and also gives you easy-to-understand summary of your network's status, with access to detailed alarms of network related errors. The Home Base interface, which is actually a Web-based interface of NNM quickly shows you the health of your network devices. It even shows the relationship between the physical infrastructure and virtual network services, and the location of trouble areas before they become critical. If there is a connectivity problem in your network, it will show you how your network elements are communicating. The software intelligently filters and correlates the network events and presents a summary message, which helps you quickly focus on the problem with a better understanding of what needs to be done to restore the network operation back to normal.

It has a Correlation Composer, which allows you to modify the event correlation behavior to fit with your particular needs without any special programming knowledge. The advanced edition of the same package features a new multi-threaded poller and analysis subsystem, called the Active Problem Analyzer.

This feature takes the output of the event-base and correlates the events with the physical topology of your network and also augments it with additional information gathered through targeted polling and data collection to determine the root cause of many common network problems. From an alarm, you can launch views focused on the area of the network in trouble to better understand the problem. From your alarms browser, select an alarm and a specific menu will appear showing what you need in order to troubleshoot the problem.

Presenting the right view helps you resolve the problem easily and quickly, without having to navigate through the software and complex maps, thereby reducing the time necessary to fix the problem.

Not only this, you can directly access the devices from the Telnet interface by just clicking the device from the drawn layout, if you intentend to change the configuration of the network device. This feature gives you the facility of remote management of a network service from a centralized console.

HP OpenView Operations Manager

The HP OpenView Operations Manager for Windows is a software that provides you complete event management, proactive performance monitoring, automated alerting, reporting and graphing of all platforms and applications running in your setup. It supports and lets you manage platforms such as Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003, all major Linux distributions, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64 and NetWare. And all this can be done from a single console. HP OpenView Operations for Windows can be configured as your centralized management console for HP Server Management tools, such as HP Systems Insight Manager, HP OpenView Network Node Manager and HP OpenView Internet Services. Plus, you can also bind products like HP OpenView Reporter and HP OpenView Service Information Portal. The OpenView Operations Manager is easy to use, quick to implement and fits in transparently into your existing infrastructure. The new versions of HP OpenView Operations now support linking system and application events directly to Microsoft's online Knowledge Base, which decreases time-to resolve IT related problems in Windows systems. This also follows the smart plug-in concept, wherein you can add a plug-in for the applications you want to monitor or manage using OpenView Operations. Using the smart plug-ins, you can poll any system's logs and get the alert events on HP OpenView Operations Manager. It also allows for auto-discovery and auto-deployment of applications. The software also has built-in tools for taking automated corrective actions, which can help system administrators and application specialists to correct problems fast. The software also includes some visualization capabilities, which let you monitor and manage virtual server environments like VMware and MS Virtual server. Data entry screen for entering a machine's hardware and software configuration in the service desk database You can use either the MMC-based console from any Windows machines or use the Web GUI from any Web browser for anytime/anywhere management of your environment. HP OpenView Operations for Windows management server is capable of supporting more than 1,000 managed nodes and thousands of events. It also has High availability features, which let you to manage servers on clustered nodes, providing data consistency and load balancing between the management server and the DBMS system. In case of a failure, automatic, fast and GUI-supported switchover and full recovery is provided. HP OpenView Service Desk This part of OpenView automates IT infrastructure management processes to manage critical IT services. The system keeps an inventory of the systems, which includes the make and hardware software configuration of all machines in the organization. Plus, it also keeps a history of past problems and their remedies for each machine. Once the problem comes to the service desk, the engineers get instant access to the machine's Configurations database and history of past problems. This helps resolve repeat problems quickly. If it is critical and can't be solved by the engineer, then the problem is escalated to higher authorities. Once the problem is solved, its history is updated in the system along with its solution. Other things that the software claims to do are reduce the time required to resolve incidents, prevent incidents from occurring or re-occurring, reduce the risks associated with an evolving IT infrastructure and manage processes involved in delivering high-quality service levels.

Where to use NNM
NNM 7.01 has two versions. There's the Starter Edition 250, which is an entry-level product designed for smaller networks wanting to manage basic layer 3 routers, hubs, and PCs from a single location. You can purchase as many as 250 node packs as you wish for one management station. This version is like a traditional network management package.

The Advanced Edition is designed for networks of all sizes requiring management of switches/VLANs, sophisticated root cause analysis and distributed environments spanning multiple sites or departments. It is packaged in four different node packs - 250, 1000, 5000 or Unlimited. It combines NNM, Extended Topology and Problem Diagnosis in one product. Then there are the NNM Smart Plug-ins that allow for extension of capabilities for specific environments such as LAN/WAN Edge, MPLS VPN, and advanced routing protocol support for IPv6, OSPF, HSRP, etc.

Anindya Roy, Sanjay Majumder and Swapnil Arora

Page(s)   1  2  3  4