Monitoring on Shane Cunningham

Cloud Orchestration template for CoreOS and Cloud Monitoring

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 08:21:02 +0000

Cloud Orchestration is an automated deployment service provided by Rackspace Cloud. The backend for this service is OpenStack Heat. The following is a simple template for deploying CoreOS Stable and runs a small bash script after the server is built to set it up for Cloud Monitoring. The script just performs the steps in my previous post on monitoring CoreOS with Cloud Monitoring. The template is pretty self explanatory so you can edit it to your liking.

Monitoring CoreOS with Rackspace Cloud Monitoring

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 11:24:00 +0000

Updated 8/5 to use systemd unit file.

Recently decided to move my blog to containers and CoreOS for learning and fun. While setting up an HAProxy container on one of my CoreOS hosts I thought about how I would monitor the host. Luckily, smart people have already thought about this. :)

I use Rackspace’s Cloud Monitoring and agent which can be setup on any server in any datacenter or cloud provider. Rackspace hosted servers get a nice GUI and awesome dashboard for the checks and monitoring data, but you could still set it all up on a non Rackspace hosted server using the Cloud Monitoring API and raxmon.

Moved to Ghost

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 10:05:25 +0000

A couple days ago I moved my blog from Wordpress to Ghost. I found the the easiest way to get a full stack Ghost blog running is to use the Rackspace Ghost Deployment. The current version of the deployment comes with a full stack consisting of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS, Ghost 0.4, node.js 0.10.21, MySQL 5.5 and nginx 1.4.4 acting as the web server passing requests back to node.js.

I run off of a 1GB Performance Cloud Server. I don’t use the included MySQL setup, instead I use a Cloud Database with 512MB RAM - 2GB storage as the backend database and Mailgun to send emails. To use an external database and your own SMTP settings just make the following changes to /var/www/vhosts/yourdomain.com/ghost/config.js.

Check_MK agent setup and configuration

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 07:40:25 +0000

Setting up OMD to get a working Nagios server is really simple, but what makes this monitoring setup really awesome is how easy Check_MK makes finding, configuring and running these checks. Setup the agent on your nodes, or just monitor SNMP/ping data, then tell Nagios/Check_MK which hosts to monitor and it will inventory and monitor all available checks it can find.

console

[root@node1 ~]# yum install -y xinetd check-mk-agent

This should create a check-mk-agent config file for xinetd at /etc/xinetd.d/check-mk-agent. We can edit one option for security, I haven’t tried running this as a regular user instead of root, but I should look into that. Uncomment the following line and specify your Nagios servers IP or hostname.

Simple Nagios setup with Open Monitoring Distribution

Wed, 19 Feb 2014 06:00:21 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Nagios for quite awhile. It has its issues, but with how easy it has become to setup with OMD and check discovery using Check_MK, I don’t know of anything else this powerful and simple to use. I’ll go over this first part which is the OMD installation and setup.

I’m using CentOS 6.5 for my Nagios server. Download links and other distros can be found here.

console

[root@nagios ~]# wget http://files.omdistro.org/releases/centos_rhel/omd-1.10-rh61-31.x86_64.rpm

[root@nagios ~]# yum localinstall omd-1.10-rh61-31.x86_64.rpm

To setup your monitoring environment you will want to create a “site”. It’s possible to have multiple sites depending on what you will be monitoring. I just created a single site for my home monitoring.

Monitor OpenIndiana/Solaris 11 with check_mk_agent and Nagios

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 07:12:09 +0000

Here’s a short how-to on monitoring OpenIndiana (Solaris 11) that is running ZFS using Nagios, check___mk and check_mk_agent. This awesome open source tool makes setting up your servers to be checked by Nagios super easy. In the past I would manually create or edit the Nagios .cfg files for my environment and install various agents depending on OS architecture on the servers I wanted to monitor. Even though I am not monitoring a ton of servers it still took quite a bit of time. Now I use check_mk and Open Monitoring Distribution. I plan to write-up a more detailed post on OMD soon, but I found it’s a very impressive bundled Nagios package with many important addons and can easily be installed on every major Linux distribution. On to monitoring Solaris 11.

How to Tweet your Nagios alerts

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:14:18 +0000

I don’t know how truly useful this is, but it’s kinda cool just for the geekiness.

I installed this on Ubuntu Server 9.04 running Nagios 3.1.2. You will want to create a Twitter account just for sending these tweets. Setup a new account and go to https://dev.twitter.com and login with the Twitter account you will be sending tweets from. Next, create a new application. After that you need to create Access Tokens for the application, you may have to refresh a bit to receive the tokens.

Nagios

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 05:20:40 +0000

A good tutuorial on using service checks by SSH.
wiki.nagios.org

Useful commands

Verify config
/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg

Plugin directory
/usr/local/nagios/libexec

Commands directory
/usr/local/nagios/etc/objects