Zenoss installation & monitoring a Linux server with SNMP

http://castix.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/installing-zenoss-and-monitoring-serve...

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• snmp
• zenoss
• monitoring
• linux
• ubuntu
• tutorial
• screencast
• debian

[sdtarheels]

can Zenoss only monitor hosts inside the local network? I would love to find something that can monitor servers accross different networks.

[bowendenning]

@sdtarheels Well.. it depends what you want to monitor as to how you configure Zenoss. For example: it is very easy to monitor externally visible services on remote servers such as SMTP, RDP, SSH or any other ports that are open on the internet. If you want to monitor using SNMP you will need to establish some sort of tunnel either using VPN or SSH to the remote network or server. You can also install Zenoss on the remote network and have it report its results back to a central Zenoss server.

[sdtarheels]

@bowendenning hmm. I basically want to set some type of monitoring up where it would notify me if the server looses connection to the internet, thus taking everyone on the network offline. Have you any experience with installing Zenoss as a virtual machine on ESXi 4.0? Thanks for getting back to me!

[bowendenning]

@sdtarheels I'll be honest; I use Nagios, and haven't used Zenoss in a prod environment (the videos were just as much for my own learning as for that of others). There are so many if, but's and maybe's that I would have to know in order to answer your question.

I'm happy to help if you can provide a more detailed explanation. Send me an email to bdenning @at@ gmail .dot. com and I'll do my best to provide the most appropriate solution for your situation.

[sdtarheels]

@bowendenning I've used and like Nagios myself. Plus from what I have read so far, Zenoss uses a lot more resources compaired to Nagios. Do you know if Nagios can be setup in the same way with different nagios installations reporting back to a master one?

[bowendenning]

@sdtarheels No, AFAIK it can't, however, it might be possible with some hackery to do something along the lines of...

When a remote nagios install detects a change in service status it then uses a trigger to report back to the main nagios server which uses a passive check.

One thing I do with multiple nagios installs at remote locations is to use the firefox plugin to montior them. I first setup an SSH tunnel and then configure the plugin to check through that to the remote nagios installs.

[sdtarheels]

@bowendenning that sounds like a great idea. Im going to send ya an e-mail if you don't mind.

[DeepSpring666]

It didn't for me. I waited for a day for it to populate. It did show the hard disk usage on the machine though. Zenpack install from UI threw me an error saying it could not be found under /bin/sh. Zenpack was there but the path was /usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/bin/s­h. I used 2.5.2 stack and the default settings. I think the installer screwed up the path. Had it been /usr/local/zenoss/.. instead of /usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/... then i think it wouldn't have been an issue.