Nagios Conference 2007

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A presentation I gave at NagiosKonferenz in Nuremberg in October, 2007. Here I discussed using Nagios as a framework for hardware-based monitoring and the necessary community interactions between proprietary hardware vendors and the open source Nagios community.

transcript

Kevin MenardServprise International, Inc.kmenard@servprise.com

+1 508.892.3823 x308

Nagios: A Framework for Hardware-based Monitoring

October 11, 2007

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Nagios Out-of-the-box

• Only monitors part of network– Software-based services– Hardware via SNMP

Structure of Modern Networks

Need for Hardware Plugins

• Necessary for total network coverage

• Monitor non-network services

• Take corrective action with hardware

SNMP isn’t Enough

• Difficult for complex operations

• MIB management can be a hassle

• Security– Non-existent security until SNMPv3– May require holes in firewall

• Need hardware-specific plugins

Nagios as Mediator

• Register event handlers with checks

• Execute event handlers due to checks

• Schedule checks based on event handlers

• Simple checks, simple event handlers

Hardware-based Plugins

• Handle complex interactions

• Provide semantic meaning

• Provide hardware-specific error messages

Web Service-enabled Hardware

• Standards-defined interface (W3C)

• Supports most modern programming languages

• Lower cost of client support

• Lower cost for client development

Web Service Security

• Use SSL channel (HTTPS)

• Use HTTP authentication methods

• No special firewall rules needed

Vendor Value Proposition

• Push complex monitoring to 3rd party

• Support widely deployed monitoring app

• Potential for community contributions

Nagios Value Proposition

• Total network coverage

• Push development off to vendor

• Competitive advantage against other monitoring applications

What Can Nagios Do?

• Can’t develop plugins for everything

• Register support with vendors

• Perhaps ship packaged up plugins– Simpler for end users

• Develop an ontology of actions

Example Ontology of Actions

Ontology Benefits

• Common set of checks

• Common set of corrective actions

• Materialized by command definitions

• Vendor interoperability

• Minimized configuration

Ontology Representation

• Use W3C’s OWL standard

• XSL transformation to command definitions

• Vendors “plug-in” command, keep command name the same

What Can Vendors Do?

• Embrace open source

• Use open interface– Can still shield proprietary internals

• Produce open source plugins using interface

Working with Nagios Community

• Users– Know what they want to use– Can offer great suggestions

• Developers– Know Nagios internals– Can offer technical support

• Neither are obligated– Quid pro quo

Plugin Licensing

• Nagios is GPL

• Plugins are not necessarily derived works

• Plugins that do not use GPL code do not need to be GPL

• Non-open source unlikely to succeed, but doable

Conclusion

• Lot of value for Nagios, vendors

• Symbiotic relationship between them

• Nagios can technically support vendors, needs to support them at higher level

• Vendors need to work with Nagios community

• End users win

ReferencesErnesto Damiani, Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati,

Stefano Paraboschi, and Pierangela Samarati. Fine grained access control for soap e-services. In WWW ’01: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 504–513, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM Press.

The Apache Software Foundation. Apache license, version 2.0, 2004.

Free Software Foundation Inc. Gnu general public license, version 2, 1991.

Paul Fremantle, Sanjiva Weerawarana, and Rania Khalaf. Enterprise services. Commun. ACM, 45(10):77–82, 2002.

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison Wesley, 1995.

Bruce Perens. Open standards: Principles and practices.

Khoi Anh Phan, Zahir Tari, and Peter Bertok. A benchmark on soap’s transport protocols performance for mobile applications. In SAC ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing, pages 1139–1144, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press.

John Soldatos and Dimitris Alexopoulos. Web services-based network management: approaches and the wsnet system. Int. J. Netw. Manag., 17(1):33–50, 2007.

Douglas B. Terry and Venugopalan Ramasubramanian. Caching xml web services for mobility. Queue, 1(3):70–78, 2003.

Robert van Engelen. Code generation techniques for developing lightweight xml web services for embedded devices. In SAC ’04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing, pages 854–861, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press.

Acknowledgements

• Nagios community

• Netways

• Servprise staff

• Special thanks to:– Melanie Bolduc– Ethan Galstad