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)

Threshold and range standards


Most checks are based on some definite range of threshold values. For example, generate critical alert if the CPU load is more than 80 percent, warning alert if it is between 60 and 80 percent. These values are not restricted to percentages, they can be virtually any numbers depending on our check's logic and requirements.

Most check plugins follow a convention in taking threshold ranges as command-line arguments. This convention may not be followed by all plugins, but most of the standard ones do. This is a recommended way of taking threshold ranges so that it is easy to understand the usage of the plugin by other potential users. The ranges are generally in following format:

[@]start:end

Things to keep in mind about various usages and corresponding interpretations of the following:

  • Range is indicated by a start value and an end value, and is inclusive of both.

  • Only start means end is infinity; only end means start is zero (note that the latter does not need a colon...