BigPanda

Nagios

Nagios provides monitoring for systems, applications, services, and business processes in your IT infrastructure. Install this integration to correlate problems detected in Nagios into actionable incidents in BigPanda so you can understand and respond faster to critical issues in your infrastructure.

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Supported Versions:

Type:

3, 4

Agent

Key Features

  • Comprehensive Monitoring - Capabilities to monitor applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, system metrics and infrastructure components with a single tool. Powerful script APIs allow easy monitoring of in-house and custom applications, services, and systems

  • Problem Remediation - Alert acknowledgments provide communication on known issues and problem response. Event handlers allow automatic restart of failed applications and services

  • Reporting - Availability reports ensure SLAs are being met. Historical reports provide record of alerts, notifications, outages, and alert response.. Third-party addons extend reporting capabilities

  • Visibility & Awareness - Centralized view of entire monitored IT infrastructure. Detailed status information available through web interface. Fast detection of infrastructure outages. Alerts can be delivered to technical staff via email or SMS. Escalation capabilities ensure alert notifications reach the right people

  • Extendable Architecture - Integration with in-house and third-party applications is easy with multiple APIs. Hundreds of community-developed addons extend core Nagios functionality.

How It Works

  • Monitoring - IT staff configure Nagios to monitor critical IT infrastructure components, including system metrics, network protocols, applications, services, servers, and network infrastructure.

  • Response - IT staff can acknowledge alerts and begin resolving outages and investigating security alerts immediately. Alerts can be escalated to different groups if alerts are not acknowledged in a timely manner.

  • Maintenance - Scheduled downtime prevents alerts during scheduled maintenance and upgrade windows.

  • Alerting - Nagios sends alerts when critical infrastructure components fail and recover, providing administrators with notice of important events. Alerts can be delivered via email, SMS, or custom script

  • Reporting - Reports provide a historical record of outages, events, notifications, and alert response for later review. Availability reports help ensure your SLAs are being met.

  • Planning - Trending and capacity planning graphs and reports allow you to identify necessary infrastructure upgrades before failures occur.

Ways to Integrate with Nagios

BigPanda provides two ways to integrate with Nagios—via notifications or via logs. The notification-based method is the default and recommended integration; however, the log-based method is also supported. Review this detailed feature comparison to choose the method that best meets your needs.

Notifications
Logs

Alert Processing

Processes only Nagios alerts that generate notifications.

Processes all Nagios alerts, regardless of filtering options set for notifications.

Incident Updates

Updates when the next notification is sent, which is based on the interval defined for the notification.

Updates when the status of an alert changes.

Notifications

Manage in Nagios for alert logic and suppression rules and in BigPanda with Environments and AutoShare rules.

Manage in BigPanda with Environments and AutoShare rules.

Custom Tags

Add custom tags independently as needed.

Add custom tags by contacting BigPanda support

Notifications & Logs

Maintenance Windows

Automatically handles downtime scheduled in Nagios as a maintenance window.

Correlation & Incident Management

  • Provides all the benefits of managing alerts in BigPanda, including correlating alerts into actionable incidents, organizing events into a concise alert life cycle, and normalizing data on the Incidents tab, where users can manage the incidents to closure.

  • Maintains all the event data for the BigPanda incidents that contain Nagios alerts so that you can report on and search through your data.

  • Syncs with the Nagios status.dat and object.dat files so that BigPanda can recover from connectivity lapses and can enrich alerts with additional attributes that help users resolve problems quickly.

  • Automatically resolves BigPanda incidents when all related alerts are resolved.

Migrating Between Nagios Integrations

If you have previously installed the log-based Nagios integration, you can migrate to the notification-based integration. Similarly, you can migrate from the notification-based integration to the log-based integration.

Prerequisites

  • Ensure your BigPanda agent is upgraded to version 3.2.4 +. You can check the version in the agent configuration file: /etc/bigpanda/bigpanda.conf. If your version is older than the required version, upgrade to the latest version of the BigPanda agent.

  • Obtain access to the Nagios configuration files.

  • Determine the app key for your current Nagios integration.

Migrating from Nagios Logs to Nagios Notifications

Configure the BigPanda Agent

  1. Remove the log-based integration from the agent by running the following command:

    bigpanda-config --remove <YOUR_APP_KEY>

  2. Add the notification-based integration by running the following command:

    bigpanda-config --add nagios-notifications --app-key <YOUR_APP_KEY>

  3. Restart the BigPanda agent service by running one of the following commands.

    • For RHEL 5 and 7, CentOS 5 and 7, Debian, and Ubuntu:

    sudo service bigpanda restart

    • For RHEL 6 and CentOS 6:

    sudo initctl restart bigpanda

Configure Nagios to Use the BigPanda Contact

  1. Add the Nagios user to the bigpanda group by running the following command:

    sudo usermod -a -G bigpanda <Nagios username>

  2. In the nagios.cfg file:

    • Add the following line: cfg_file=/etc/bigpanda/bigpanda-contact.cfg

    • Ensure that notifications are enabled. enable_notifications=1

  3. In the file where your host objects are defined (for example, templates.cfg):

    • Add the bigpanda contact to the contact_groups.

    • Set the notification_options for the host to: d,r,u,f,s.

define host{
        name                            generic-host
        contact_groups                  admins,bigpanda
        notification_period             24x7
        notification_options            d,r,u,f,s
}

If the contact_groups option is not already listed in your definitions, you can add it.

  1. In the file where your service objects are defined (for example, templates.cfg):

    • Add the bigpanda contact to the contact_groups.

    • Set the notification_options for the service to: c,r,w,u,f,s.

define service{
        name                            generic-service
        check_period                    24x7
        contact_groups                  admins,bigpanda
        notification_interval           60
        notification_period             24x7
        notification_options            c,r,w,u,f,s
}

If you have already configured notification options on a more specific template or definition, those settings will take precedence over the generic settings. To get the most out of this integration, ensure all of the desired notifications are sent to BigPanda.

  1. Restart the Nagios service.

Migrating from Nagios Notifications to Nagios Logs

Configure Nagios to Stop Using the BigPanda Contact

  1. In the nagios.cfg file, remove the following line: cfg_file=/etc/bigpanda/bigpanda-contact.cfg

  2. In the files where your host and service objects are defined (for example, templates.cfg), remove the bigpanda contact from the contact_groups list in the generic-service and generic-host definitions.

define service{
        name                            generic-service
        check_period                    24x7
        contact_groups                  admins
        notification_interval           60
        notification_period             24x7
}

If bigpanda is the only contact in your contact_groups option, you can delete the whole line.

  1. Restart the Nagios service.

Configure the BigPanda Agent

  1. Remove the notification-based integration from the agent by running the following command:

    bigpanda-config --remove <YOUR_APP_KEY>

  2. Add the log-based integration by running the following command:

    bigpanda-config --add nagios --app-key <YOUR_APP_KEY>

  3. Restart the bigpanda-agent service:

    • For RHEL 5 and 7, CentOS 5 and 7, Debian, and Ubuntu:

    sudo service bigpanda restart

    • For RHEL 6 and CentOS 6:

    sudo initctl restart bigpanda

Updated 9 months ago

Recommended Reading

Integrating a Monitoring Service

Nagios

Nagios provides monitoring for systems, applications, services, and business processes in your IT infrastructure. Install this integration to correlate problems detected in Nagios into actionable incidents in BigPanda so you can understand and respond faster to critical issues in your infrastructure.

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