James Clark banditbbs@gmail.com

Topics Discussed
 About Me / My Monitoring History
 Monitoring History at Current Company
 Prerequisites
 Current Company Setup
 Scripts
 Nagios Configuration
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About Me
 Have been in the IT industry since 1988
 In 2004 became server group manager
 Have been using Nagios since ~2003
 Switched to XI ~2010 (And loved every part of it)
 Changed jobs in August 2012 and quickly convinced new company to purchase XI
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About Me
 Private web page is http://www.bandits-home-on-theweb.com
 On that page you will find some of the
Nagios modifications I have done
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History of Monitoring and Alerting at new job
 Many monitoring applications spread through-out the IT department
 CCSS for iSeries
 Foglight for DB
 SCOM for Windows
 Three separate Nagios Core servers
 IBM NetCool
 Many departments had no monitoring
 All of the applications forward to NetCool and
NetCool then forwards alerts to AlarmPoint (xMatters)
 AlarmPoint holds the on-call schedule for the many different groups in the IT department
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History of Monitoring and Alerting at new job
 CCSS for iSeries
 Partial conversion to XI started
 Foglight for DB
 Complete conversion to XI hopeful
 SCOM for Windows
 Will either develop custom script to communicate back and forth. Currently testing WMI and hope to use that instead
 Three separate Nagios Core servers
 Converted to a single XI server
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History of Monitoring and Alerting at new job
 IBM NetCool
 Removing from company
 AlarmPoint
 More than likely, removing from company
 One primary XI server currently with 3 mod_gearman workers
 One XI server for monitoring primary XI and a few other devices
 One XI server in our DR web data center
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History of Monitoring and Alerting at new job
 Besides AlarmPoint, On-Call schedule is kept in a separate MS SharePoint site that the DC Operations uses.
 No fulltime administrator for either NetCool or
AlarmPoint.
 When done switching everything to NagiosXI, a significant savings will be realized.
 One of the main hurdles to the switch, is on-call rotation for alerting.
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On Call Data - Prerequisites
 On-call information stored in some application
 On-call information able to be exported from the application in a specific format
 A job scheduler to run the jobs
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On Call Data – Our Setup
 SharePoint site to store on-call schedule
 SharePoint admin created an application to export the data needed and send the files to an FTP server.
 Two files are sent, one for primary and one for secondary.
 We use Control-M to schedule the above program and the two Linux scripts.
 The job is run daily at 8am. Our on-call changes
Monday’s at 8am.
 If changes are made to the on-call schedule, that need to take effect immediately, the job is manually run. Otherwise, it can wait until the next day at 8am.
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On Call Data – Our Setup
Added ID to contacts table.
Added short name to On-Call
Groups table.
Set the SharePoint site to alert me when any changes done to those two tables so it can be mirrored it in Nagios.
The scripts do handle blanks. This will be shown in a later slide.
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On Call Data – Example files
Networking,network,smithj
System p Administration,aix_admins,doej
AE Direct,aed_infra,user1
Database,dba,clarks
System i Administration,system_i_admin,walenciejs
Wintel Administration,wintel_admins,hilderbrandr
System i Applications,system_i_apps,brownr
Client Server Applications,client_server,yatesp
DataWarehouse/Enterprise Rpts,datawarehouse,connerys
Store Applications,store_apps,probstj
The first field is what is displayed on the
SharePoint site and is the alias assigned in
Nagios. The second field is the name given to the contact groups. The third field is of course the ID of the user.
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On Call Data – FTP Script
HOST=xxxxxxx #This is the FTP servers host or IP address.
USER=xxxxxxx #This is the FTP user that has access to the server.
PASS=xxxxxxx #This is the password for the FTP user.
ftp -inv $HOST << EOF user $USER $PASS cd /nagiosftp get primaryOnCall.txt
get secondaryOnCall.txt
delete primaryOnCall.txt
delete secondaryOnCall.txt
bye
EOF exit 0
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On Call Data – Data Manipulation Script
#!/usr/bin/perl
#Remove old config files system ("find /usr/local/nagios/etc/static -type f -not -name 'xi*' not -name 'esc*' -not -name 'aed_*' | xargs rm");
#Process primary on-call file open (INFILE, 'primaryOnCall.txt') or die $1; while (<INFILE>) { chomp;
($group, $alias, $id) = split(","); if (($alias ne '') && ($group ne '') && ($id ne '')) { open (OUTFILE, '>/usr/local/nagios/etc/static/' . $alias .
'_oncall_pri.cfg'); print OUTFILE "define contactgroup{\n";
"_oncall_pri\n"; print OUTFILE "contactgroup_name $alias" . print OUTFILE "alias $group\n"; print OUTFILE "members $id\n"; print OUTFILE "}"; close (OUTFILE);
}
} close (INFILE);
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On Call Data – Data Manipulation Script(cont…)
#Process secondary on-call file open (INFILE, 'secondaryOnCall.txt') or die $1; while (<INFILE>) { chomp;
($group, $alias, $id) = split(","); if (($alias ne '') && ($group ne '') && ($id ne '')) { open (OUTFILE, '>/usr/local/nagios/etc/static/' . $alias .
'_oncall_sec.cfg'); print OUTFILE "define contactgroup{\n"; print OUTFILE "contactgroup_name $alias" .
"_oncall_sec\n"; print OUTFILE "alias $group\n"; print OUTFILE "members $id\n"; print OUTFILE "}"; close (OUTFILE);
}
} close (INFILE);
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On Call Data – Data Manipulation Script(cont…)
#Change ownership and permissions of config files system ("sudo /bin/chown apache:nagios
/usr/local/nagios/etc/static/*.cfg"); system ("sudo /bin/chmod 777 /usr/local/nagios/etc/static/*.cfg");
#Delete data files system ("rm primaryOnCall.txt"); system ("rm secondaryOnCall.txt");
#Restart Nagios system ("sudo su -l nagios -c 'cd /usr/local/nagiosxi/scripts/ &&
./reconfigure_nagios.sh'");
#Exit clean exit 0;
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On Call Data – List of Files Created
Due to a blank for secondary oncall in the file, only the primary file for datawarehouse exists.
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On Call Data – Files Created – Example Content
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NagiosXI Configuration
 No contacts or contact groups are assigned to the hosts or services. Unless you want to always receive alerts. i.e. Someone who needs alerted that is not a member of the specific on-call group.
 Users receive permissions to see hosts and services by having an escalation for them
 Escalations must be created for both hosts and services. Services do not inherit escalations like they do notifications
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NagiosXI Configuration(cont…)
 Escalations created as static config files.
 Otherwise Nagios would error on the empty contact groups.
 All members of groups go into an ALL group.
This will be used to give users permissions
 The group manager goes into a BOSS group.
This is used for alerting the manager after on-call individuals fail to acknowledge an issue
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Static Configuration Example - Hosts define hostescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall contact_groups network_oncall_pri first_notification 1 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
} define hostescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall contact_groups network_oncall_sec first_notification 2 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
} define hostescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall contact_groups network_boss first_notification 4 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
} define hostescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall contact_groups network_all first_notification 3 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
}
Created by script
Created by script
Created in XI and manager of group assigned as member
Created in XI and all members of group assigned as members
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Static Configuration Example - Services define serviceescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall service_description * contact_groups network_oncall_pri first_notification 1 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
} define serviceescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall service_description * contact_groups network_oncall_sec first_notification last_notification
2
0 notification_interval 15
} define serviceescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall service_description * contact_groups network_all first_notification 3 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
} define serviceescalation{ hostgroup_name network_oncall service_description * contact_groups network_boss first_notification last_notification
4
0 notification_interval 15
}
The way we set it up, it uses the same hostgroup used for all the hosts and uses a wildcard for service, to include all services.
This could get very complicated if different groups/individuals were needed on different services on the same host.
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Static Configuration Example - Services define serviceescalation{ host_name * servicegroup_name dba_oncall contact_groups dba_oncall_pri,dba_oncall_sec first_notification 1 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
} define serviceescalation{ host_name * servicegroup_name dba_oncall contact_groups dba first_notification 500 last_notification 0 notification_interval 15
}
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Static Configuration Example - Services
The services can be an simple as the last slide, or as complex as you can imagine. This attached file is a great example of the complexity that is capable.
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James Clark
Systems Monitoring Administrator banditbbs@gmail.com