1. Campus Monitoring Service
KNOW What IS Working and What is NOT!

2. Eric Frahm, Technology Services
From internal tool, to campus-wide service
Friendly UI, low learning curve
Many canned reports, graphs, dashboards, and views
True ‘out of band’ notification
Flexible data input and output
Extreme monitoring flexibility
The Campus Monitoring Service provides;
Any campus IT Professionals and departments
Who can use the service?
Originally conceived as an internal tool at ‘CITES’, this service was implemented as a ‘Campuswide’ service to meet the status sharing needs of Technology Services and to provide a turnkey solution for small department monitoring needs.
Wizards for simple and well-known monitoring needs
Canned reports, easy dashboards, and customizable views
True out of band notifications with SMS modems and independent battery backup
Multiple client, agent, and API options for feeding data in or pulling it out
If you can script it, we can turn it into a Nagios probe.

3. Service Infrastructure
Nagios XI on CentOS 6.9
Commercially supported
Proprietary UI for ease of use
Built Nagios Core 4.2.4
Redundant physical servers
Reduced dependencies for datacenter
Datacenter redundancy
Out of band SMS
Nagios XI
Based on the Nagios Core opensource platform, Nagios XI provides a commercially supported installation and interface, allowing for easier to use wizards and reporting options, removing the learning curve and accelerating the implementation of basic monitoring and providing vendor support for the underlying infrastructure.
This service retains the basic ability of Nagios Core to create a probe for anything you can script, and decades of community contribution offer a lot of solutions.
Redundant physical servers
Initially deployed as two separate physical servers at two separate datacenters, with physically redundant out-of-band SMS notification, this service is intended for highly available monitoring and notification. If the internet burns down, we can still page you at 1am!

4. The Current Service
1889 hosts 7956 services 176 users 37 Technology Services Teams 3 Distributed IT Units 7 Campus Departments

5. Jason Colwell, Library IT
116 Servers
CPU, Memory, Swap, Disk Usage, Puppet, Ping
36 websites
DNS IP Match, DNS Resolution, HTTP, Ping, SSL cert status, Web page content
Over 1400 service checks

6. Nagios Cross-Platform Agent
Used for Linux and Windows servers
Standardize as much as possible
Web interface is useful
Installation with SCCM and Puppet
Apply community secret or token
Firewall rules
Enable as service

7. Lessons Learned Be careful when cloning hosts and services
Verify that all of your hosts and service checks are in place
Adjust the defaults for the NCPA wizard if needed and continue to change alert thresholds

8. Rob Murdock, Technology Services
Nagios is a lot like Tinker Toys: you can do just about anything with it

9. Nagios XI (data destination)h1 XI h2 h3
Campus Monitoring runs on Nagios XI:
hosts (Linux, Windows, etc.) and services are monitored...
● Active (e.g., NRPE)
● Passive (e.g., NRDP)
● SNMP, NSCA, etc.

10. Nagios or ? (data sources)h1
Core h2 h3
Colleges, units, departments may already be using Core: Essentially the same design pattern as XI...

11. Federated Monitoring Why not hook them together?
Core XI h2 h3
NRDP: Nagios Remote Data Processor
NRPE: Nagios Remote Plugin Executor
NSCA: Nagios Service Check Acceptor
Why not hook them together?
Have Core feed XI in certain situations...
Notifications?
Reporting?

12. Why ‘Growing Strong’ Eric Frahm, Technology Services
Nagios may seem like a ‘Rich Soil’ topic
Nagios is best known for infrastructure
BUT … Monitoring can be about much more than pinging routers and hosts.

13. Monitoring as a Development Consideration
Monitoring should be a development consideration
Developers already use automated test cases
Those SAME test cases can be monitoring probes
Production metrics feed back into development
You never want your NEW website to be slower than your OLD website!!
As we design and deploy infrastructure, software, and services, we should be considering how we will monitor these.
Developers are used to designing test cases and how to implement those tests in automated ways.
Those SAME test cases can be repurposed for testing services and applications in production.
Monitoring ongoing production services provides baseline response and performance metrics which inform development priorities and criteria.
You never want your NEW website to be slower than your OLD website!!

14. Tools already implemented
Selenium web scripting
Splunk-to-Nagios
REST API
Selenium web scripting
We have installed a Selenium RC (standalone) server on a Windows workstation for running selenium scripts against a website or web applications.
Splunk-to-Nagios
We are currently working with the Splunk team to implement an alert method in Splunk that allows parsed results and alerts (Error events) to be sent from Splunk into Nagios.

15. In Summary … The service is running The service is being used
We want to help!

19. Thank you! Questions?
Campus Monitoring, Jason Colwell, Eric Frahm, Rob Murdock, Campus Monitoring Nagios