Monitoring with Nagios

We monitor the systems we run with nagios. It sends out alerts if a system is down, and measures uptime. For some clients, it sends our uptime reports. For some of our contracts we have committed to maintaining a certain level of uptime, so keeping accurate statistics is important.

See also:

• Defining a new service
• Restarting services automatically

Connecting to the web UI

• The main page is http://nagios.curationexperts.com/nagios/. You will need nagios credentials. If you need an account, ask Bess or Mark to create one for you.

• Quick links:

  1. All Services
  2. Current Unhandled Service Problems

Receiving notifications

1. Email – this is the default. If you want to be added to the email notifications for a service, talk to Bess or Mark.
2. On your phone – There are several apps out there. Bess likes to use MobiosPush
3. In a desktop client – NagBar is an OSX app that runs in the background and alerts you to service problems.

Server setup

The server is nagios.curationexperts.com. Nagios is installed in /usr/local/nagios. Configuration is in /usr/local/nagios/etc. Please note, this directory is under local version control. If you make any changes, please identify yourself and commit your changes with a meaningful commit message. E.g.:

$ git config user.name "Bess Sadler"
$ git config user.email "bess@curationexperts.com"
$ git commit -a -m "Adding an entry for BarBaz University hosting contract"

Emory uptime reports

We send out a weekly email report summarizing uptime for our hosted clients. Right now, our only client who gets these is Emory.

• The script to send the Emory uptime reports is /usr/local/nagios/bin/email_pdf_reports.sh
• The reports that have already been sent out are in /opt/EmoryNagiosReports

Adding a user

1. Log in as nagios. cd /usr/local/nagios/etc
2. git status to ensure the directory is in a clean, known state
3. htpasswd /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users NEW_USER_NAME. Provide a password when prompted.
4. Add the new user name to cgi.cfg, everywhere that user needs access.
5. Git commit -a -m "Adding NEW_USER_NAME to nagios config"
6. $ sudo /etc/init.d/nagios reload