blog/data/2010-01-27-sitesummary.txt

   1 Title: Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration
   2 Tags: english, nuug, debian edu, sitesummary
   3 Date: 2010-01-27 15:15
   4
   5 <p>One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
   6 Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
   7 days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
   8 Nagios.  The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
   9 analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
  10 further.</p>
  11
  12 <p>When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
  13 configured as a Munin and Nagios server.  In addition, it is
  14 configured to be a server for the
  15 <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary">SiteSummary
  16 system</a> I have written for use in Debian Edu.  The SiteSummary
  17 system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
  18 work.  In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
  19 information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
  20 computer submitting information to this collector.  This allow for
  21 automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
  22 which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
  23 packages got etc.  This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
  24 and Nagios configuration.</p>
  25
  26 <p>All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
  27 munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
  28 client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
  29 up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.</p>
  30
  31 <p>All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
  32 automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
  33 services detected).  In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
  34 the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
  35 sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
  36 raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
  37 the machine.</p>
  38
  39 <p>The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
  40 based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
  41 with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
  42 keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.</p>
  43
  44 <p>The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
  45 is to set the password used to get access via HTTP.  The system
  46 administrator need to run "<tt>htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
  47 nagiosadmin</tt>" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
  48 it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages.  After that,
  49 everything is taken care of.</p>