Archive for the 'English' Category

Weekly Snap: Hwg-STE & Starface updates, consulting & OSDC early bird rates

Published by Amanda Mailer on 15.03.2010 in Diverses and English. 0 Comments

camera Weekly Snap: Hwg STE & Starface updates, consulting & OSDC early bird ratesMar 8 – 12 offered updates for HW group network thermometers and Starface checks, a few reflections on consulting work and a reminder to early birds to join the OSDC soon.

Hardware man Martin announced the latest firmware for HW group Hwg-STE network thermometers, version 1.12, with improved stability, a graphing feature and an online demo to boot. Meanwhile Birger tipped off the updated check_starface.pl for version 4 of Starface’s voice appliance, available under GPL at monitoringexchange.org and netways.org.

Birger then shared a little about himself, his views on open source entering the mainstream and his consulting work at NETWAYS. From large scale monitoring at Bosch to high tech television monitoring at Deutsche Welle, Birger reflected that the variety and freedom to create concepts for different customers was what he enjoyed most. To support, he added a few photos from his recent consulting trip to Stryker in Duisburg where medical tech met monitoring and hearty pork knuckles.

From the events team, Manuela reminded us that the early bird catches the discount for the Open Source Data Center Conference. From the 23rd to 24th of June exciting presentations not to be missed include Baron Schwartz on Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB Performance, Florian Haas on High Availability and Storage Replication and Michael Schlenzka on Delivering New, Powerful Reporting Solutions with Open Source Business Intelligence. Not to mention the guarantee that football fans will be catered for when Germany takes on Ghana- there’s no reason not to book early.

Weekly Snap: CeBIT craze and Nagios training haze

Published by Amanda Mailer on 08.03.2010 in CeBIT, Diverses and English. 0 Comments

camera Weekly Snap: CeBIT craze and Nagios training hazeMar 1 – 6 got CeBIT crazy with a virtual Nagios training here and a physical Nagios training there.

From the office Manuela announced trainings galore with a new interactive Nagios learning experience. In cooperation with Linux Magazin Academy, our trainer Michael Streb will be rattling off 13 video classes on Nagios for newbies. Available online, whenever, wherever and as often as desired, the new training course comes with a free demo. For those who like it in the flesh, a few last tickets are on the go for a Nagios beginners workshop on 15 – 18 March. Grab a discount by registering with the voucher code: “NaMä5″

Beginning with the first impressions and ending with the last, snippets and photos where flying out from our team at this year’s CeBIT. Of note, was the immense interest in Puppet for configuration management, and monitoring solutions Nagios and Icinga. Perhaps it had something to do with the well received presentations by Julian (‘Monitoring Large IT Infrastructures with Nagios and Icinga’), Bernd (‘Open Source Data Warehouse for IT Management’ and ‘Project Icinga’) and Michael (‘Nagios Online Training’)which will be available on in Linux Magazin’s Live Streaming archives soon.

Nonetheless, with visits from Radio F and the Nürnberger newspaper, to political VIPs Ms Beate Merk and Mr Franz Josef Pschierer and trumpeting Bavarian brass bands in lederhosen, this year’s CeBIT was definitely memorable one.

Weekly Snap: Plugins for iSMS & HW Group, speeches for OSDC & CeBIT

Published by Amanda Mailer on 01.03.2010 in Diverses and English. 0 Comments

camera Weekly Snap: Plugins for iSMS & HW Group, speeches for OSDC & CeBITFeb 22- 26 got us geared up for the OSDC and CeBIT, introduced ideas for HW Group monitoring hardware and Mult-Tech iSMS alerting.

Plunging into plugins, hardware man Martin recommended a convenient alternative to SNMP monitoring for environment sensors. A range of monitoring plugins for HW Group devices, developed in house are now available under GPL at www.monitoringexchange.org.

Meanwhile, Birger thanked Eric Pearce for his article “Using an SMS Server to Provide a Robust Alerting Service for Nagios” in Linux Journal. In his comprehensive guide on using Multi-Tech iSMS hardware (otherwise known as SMSFinder) for SMS alerting, Eric suggested the NETWAYS iSMS plugin for simultaneous interaction with multiple servers. But beforehand, he kindly contacted us first with a few suggestions for improvement, which we gladly obliged and must give credit for.

Moving onto events, Manuela got excited about the high calibre speakers, latest trends and juicy steaks awaiting us at the OSDC on 23-24 June. From Rainer Jung, Apache Software Foundation to Michael Schlenzka, Jaspersoft, and Jörg Möllenkamp, Sun Microsystems, the OSDC promises 2 jam-packed days. Perhaps the speakers or perhaps the BBQ she has planned outdoors, we are looking forward to the OSDC as much as the summer.

With the world’s largest IT expo round the corner, Manuela went on to tip off the first ever dedicated open source forum at CeBIT where Julian and Bernd will be appearing. So if you’re round check out “Monitoring large IT infrastructures with Nagios and Icinga” or “An open source data warehouse for IT management” to see the boys on stage, or swing by Hall 9, Stand B20 for a chat. Email info@netways.de to cash in on the handful of complimentary tickets still on hand!

Weekly Snap: Sculio support, Bacula checks and Nagios plugin tests

Published by Amanda Mailer on 22.02.2010 in Diverses and English. 0 Comments

camera Weekly Snap: Sculio support, Bacula checks and Nagios plugin testsFeb 15-19 touched on startup support, Nagios and Bacula monitoring tips for a light blog week.

Always on the lookout for cool projects, Bernd announced our support for Sculio. The young start up we chanced upon at Webmontag, offers project sponsor search and member benefits to students through a partnership program with companies. This year NETWAYS will sponsor Sculio with web hosting.

On the monitoring theme, William offered his quick Nagios tip. A convenient colour coded prompt to take the hassle out of remembering exit codes when testing a Nagios plugin on the command line.

Meanwhile Julian shared two monitoring plugins developed in house for Bacula: check_bacula for individual job monitoring within a specified time frame and count_bacula to view pool utilization. Get them off netways.org under GPL with many other monitoring goodies.

Quick Tip: Testing Nagios Plugins

Published by William Preston on 15.02.2010 in English and Nagios. 1 Comment

Sometimes when testing a Nagios Plugin on the command line, it’s useful to know the exit code.
You can always use echo $?, but that becomes tedious if you have to type it often.
Additionally you have to remember what the exit codes mean.

The following snippet adds a prompt that changes colour according to the exit code; 0 is green, 1 is yellow, 2 is red and 3 is grey. This makes it easy to see at a glance what the exit code was.

Add the following to a file e.g. debug.sh

export colormap=([0]=32 [1]=33 [2]=31 [3]=37)
export PS1='\[\e[${colormap[$?]}m\]\u@\h:\w\$\[\e[30m\] '

Then source it in .bashrc or on the command line with

source debug.sh

and enjoy.


nagios@localhost:~$ ./check_plugin 192.168.0.1
OK - 1824 bytes in 0.002 seconds
nagios@localhost:~$ ./check_plugin 192.168.0.2
Unable to open TCP socket
nagios@localhost:~$

Weekly Snap: NSClient++ in the spotlight

Published by Amanda Mailer on 15.02.2010 in Diverses and English. 0 Comments

weekly snapFeb 8-12 was a week quietly dedicated to NSClient++ with a look at Windows Eventlog, CheckMultiple, and the success of the NSClient++ website.

Michael S began part 4 of his NSClient++ series by introducing the filter method to monitor Windows Eventlog. With an example query showing day old system log error (or unsuccessful) messages created by a service, he pointed to the filter language documentation for a wealth of parameters. Michael also recommended CheckMultiple for compound queries, giving an example review of disk utilisation in percentage and absolute terms. Of note here, is that results show the worst sub-check status, as a combination of both checks in the performance data to ensure the individual results are available to view.

We also took our hats off to the NSClient++ project and maintainer, Michael Medin for its ever growing website traffic load, downloads and popularity.

NSClient++ plus speed

Published by Amanda Mailer on 10.02.2010 in English, Hosting and Monitoring. 2 Comments

nsclient NSClient++ plus speedNSClient++ seems to be whizzing away with Project Maintainer Michael Medin working on a 0.4 branch towards as beta. Perhaps due to his ever active development, or because NSClient++ has become the standard Windows monitoring daemon for Nagios and other monitoring systems such as OpenMNS and Icinga… for some reason there has been over 60 GB traffic loading its web server monthly.

As you may already be aware, NETWAYS has been hosting the NSClient++ website since mid last year. Just yesterday, our Managed Services team had to carry out some performance tuning on the good old NSClient++ web server which was in need of extra speed. Hopefully now, we will be able to keep up with NSClient++ and its ever growing downloads and popularity. Kudos to Michael Medin for keeping us on our toes!

Weekly Snap: Xmas in January, Jasper in LTR

Published by Amanda Mailer on 08.02.2010 in Diverses and English. 0 Comments

weekly snapFeb 1-5 kicked off the month with Christmas in January, new firmware, a Jasper appearance in the Linux Technical Review and more NSClient++.

To begin the week, hardware man Martin announced another new firmware release, this time for AKCP securityProbe to support SMS messaging alerts via the Teltonika Modem USB / G10 GSM Modem.

Meanwhile Michael rolled out part 3 of his NSClient++ series with a look at Windows monitoring fundamentals. Beginning with a CPU capacity utilisation check, he gave the command lines for disk and memory utilisation checks, uptime and service state checks. All of which are carried out through the check_nrpe plugin.

Bernd shared his recent article contribution to the Linux Technical Review on Jasper Reporting, covering everything from the reporting framework structure to iReport tips and tricks and data selection.

Finally, just as the last, NETWAYS celebrated Christmas closer to the end of January than December with a good dose of mulled wine, confused senses at the Tower of Senses, XXL double beef burgers at the Skybar, topped off with karaoke. Should the tradition proceed, one year we may be donning the Santa hat in a beer garden soaking up some sunshine.

Weekly Snap: Nagios Training & CeBIT offers, JConsole, NSClient, Bacula tips

Published by Amanda Mailer on 01.02.2010 in Diverses and English. 1 Comment

weekly snapJan 25-29 was a packed week with monitoring tips on Java, hardware and NSClient++ , a Bacula appearance plus event dates to remember.

Always open to convenient, info-in-a-glance solutions, Bernd shared his latest Java monitoring kick: JConsole a swing application to monitor Java processes via JMX on local or remote systems. With a few screenshots from iReport, he offered a peek into the memory use of virtual machines and the Java caused processor load provided by JConsole. Bundled to Java since version 1.5, JConsole is his recommendation for a quick overview of your virtual machines.

For reading recommendations, Julian contributed a print and online article on Bacula in Computerwoche, commending their milestone 1 millionth download on the wayside.

More on the monitoring front, hardware man Martin, shared HW group’s new firmware for the HWg-STE network thermometer and Michael followed with part 2 of his NSClient++ series. He offered a thorough installation guide from download of the MSI pack or ZIP archive to registration and check activation, configuration and test.

Finally, Manuela tipped off two dates to keep in mind for March: 2nd-3rd for CeBIT and 15th-18th for our Nagios Availability training course. To be held at the Holiday Inn in Nuremberg, the course is for Nagios newbies, offering a strong foundation in system monitoring, Nagios, its addons, and practical exercises such as web frontend connection, configuration and integration. As generous as we are, our blog readers get a 5% discount if they quote “Blog_NSch” when registering. Otherwise email Manuela (manuela.pirner@netways.de) for free tickets to CeBIT, so you can swing by to visit us in Hall 9, Stand B20. We hope to see you there!

Weekly Snap: Nagios in Magna, Kempten, Saxony’s Public Attorney & T-Mobile plus NSClient++

Published by Amanda Mailer on 25.01.2010 in Diverses and English. 1 Comment

weekly snapJan 18-22 was dominated by our project consulting team with Nagios monitoring left right and center.

Birger got around, visiting Magna in Thuringa, Kempten in Allgaeu and the Public Attorney in Saxony–Anhalt. In Thuringa, he threw praise on Magna’s orderly data center and software configurations during a Nagios consultation, and in Saxony-Anhalt did his bit for civil society in helping the Pubic Attorney get monitored by Nagios. In Kepmten Birger marvelled at their winter wonderland while on his way to fix a SNMP trap connection to EventDB by snmpd and snmptt.

With less travelling, but equal roaming, Manuela tipped off our latest success story on a massive network monitoring project achieved at T-Mobile. Check it out to see how Nagios is supporting your international data roaming on GSM when you travel.

To top off the Nagios theme, Michael introduced his NSClient++ blog series. He began with module groups: checkDisk (checks disk utilization), checkEventLog (checks entries in the eventlog), CheckSystem (checks processes, services, CPU utilization) and CheckHelpers (offers more ways of running checks). Each module is broken down into various sub-modules which carry out queries, and the parameterization of individual checks is similar. As he moves on with his series, Michael should cover installation, configuration and the running of several checks, which are communicated exclusively via encrypted NRPE to the monitored system. Keep posted!

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