Book Image

Icinga Network Monitoring

By : Viranch Mehta
Book Image

Icinga Network Monitoring

By: Viranch Mehta

Overview of this book

<p>Icinga has a very flexible configuration that lets you describe your network and server’s infrastructure, and tell Icinga what services you want to monitor and get uptime reports for. You can customize the monitoring behaviour as well as notification methods with plugins. You can also configure handlers that run automatically when a service goes down.</p> <p>This book gives you a deep insight into setting up automated monitoring for small-scale to large-scale network and server infrastructures. With rising business around cloud computing services such as SaaS, IaaS, and others; service providers have to increase their network infrastructure with a number of servers and services. You will learn to keep tabs on these services to ensure maximum SLA that is promised to the customers.</p> <p>Icinga comes with ample example configurations that monitor the Icinga server itself. The book analyzes the default sample configuration. You will learn to monitor public services on remote servers, system health of Linux and Windows servers as well as the network devices. You will also look into how to customize the monitoring mechanism with plugins. You will then move towards alerting methods, how they work, and how they can be customized. At the end of the book, you will have a look into the web interface that gives the current status of the entire infrastructure and some reporting tools.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Notifications


We would, as is the point of having monitoring systems, like to get alerted when something actually goes down. We don't want to keep monitoring the Icinga web interface screen, waiting for something to go down. Icinga provides a very generic and flexible way of sending out alerts. We can have any alerting script triggered when something goes wrong, which in turn may run commands for sending e-mails, SMS, Jabber messages, Twitter tweets, or practically anything that can be done from within a script. The default localhost monitoring setup has an e-mail alerting configuration, which we used in the first chapter.

The way these notifications work is that we define contact objects where we give the contact name, e-mail addresses, pager numbers, and other necessary details. These contact names are specified in the host/service templates or the objects themselves. So, when Icinga detects that a host/service has gone down, it will use this contact object to send contact details to the...