This page has my notes form the conference. 

In order to allow the Nagios system to run thousands of alert checks per minute, we needed to tune a few things in Nagios.

First we moved the database and program directories /var/lib and /usr/local over to a high speed EMC disk Array.

Create a RAM disk for Nagios tempory files

I created a ramdisk by adding the following entry to the /etc/fstab file:

none                              /mnt/ram                        tmpfs   size=500M           0 0

NOTE: These instructions apply to a system that has not previously had NRPE installed on it.  If NRPE has been previously installed, you will need to backup the nrpe.cfg file to ensure it is not lost.

NOTE2: The system you are installing this on MUST have access to your nagios server on port 80.  You can verify this by typing "telnet nagiosserver.mycompany.com 80".

1. Install rpmforge on the linux system

Please refer to this document on installing it if you have not already: http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge

2. Next: install nagios-nrpe on the system

rpm -q nagios-nrpe ||  yum --enablerepo=rpmforge install nagios-nrpe

Client Setup Instructions

1. Open Firefox
2. Search for the Selenium IDE plugin and install it.

Recording Selenium Script

*NOTE* This script WILL record passwords.

Naming Standards

Hostname Naming Standards:

• Pattern: host.domain
• Example: Hostname.domain.com

Each hostname will have a fully qualified domain name.

Please refer to JMX::Jmx4Perl::Manual for installation instructions 

for how to deploy the agent servlet (which can be found in the distribution as agent/j4p.war

Reference Links

1. JMX::Jmx4Perl page on seach.cpan.org

Introduction to JMX Technology

Java Management Extensions Technology is a new feature in version 5.0 of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). If you are already familiar with JMX technology, see Appendix A, "JMX Technology Versions" for version information.

a.  Regular Expression HTTP monitor

We need the ability to monitor a part of a page.   The content needs to be able to match content on a page using regular expressions.  Also needed is the ability to log into the page.  Example of expression: /Temp_P18.*\n.*\n.*;(.*) Deg. C.*\n.*\n.*\n.*;(.*) %/

We need to be able to catch the values in the "()" areas listed above and check against those values.

We're experiencing issues with some monitors giving a HTTP-FORBIDDEN issue with the check_http scripts.

nsca - Daemon and client program for sending passive check results across the network

nrpe - Daemon and plugin for executing plugins on remote hosts

Introduction

On of the features of Nagios is that is can process service check results that are submitted by external applications. Service checks which are performed and submitted to Nagios by external apps are called passive checks. Passive checks can be contrasted with active checks, which are service checks that have been initiated by Nagios.

Why The Need For Passive Checks?

Passive checks are useful for monitoring services that are:

• located behind a firewall, and can therefore not be checked actively from the host running Nagios
• asynchronous in nature and can therefore not be actively checked in a reliable manner (e.g. SNMP traps, security alerts, etc.)

How Do Passive Checks Work?

When setting up alerts in Nagios some are better to be active while others can be passive.  Further Active monitoring can be executed either on the Nagios server or started from Nagios but executed remotely, see diagram.

Event Correlation and Analysis Market Definition and Architecture Description, 2009
Debra Curtis, David Williams

When embarking on an event correlation and analysis (ECA) project, it's important to consider the right event management specialist  products, manager of managers (MoMs) and business service management (BSM) options, pulling together the appropriate sources and data types supported by the right ECA architecture.

Basic Setup

On fedora or CentOS just install the RPM for Nagios and the plugins

yum install nagios

Edit the config files in /etc/nagios/objects

Check the config files are valid by typing

nagios -v /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg

Start nagios by typing

/etc/init.d/nagios restart