Monitoring Blog
Release announcements, technical guides and monitoring insights from the ConSol team.
check_hpasm unterstützt jetzt Proliant Gen8
Sunday, November 25, 2012 in Insights
Die neuen Proliant Gen8 scheinen seit September Einzug in die Rechenzentren zu halten. Damals erhielt ich die erste Mail, in der mir von unrealistischen Ergebnissen berichtet wurde. Anscheinend waren bei mehreren Temperatursensoren im Server Schwellwerte von -99 Grad registriert. Zumindest war das der Wert, den die Sensoren meldeten, wenn sie mit check_hpasm abfragt wurden. Mangels Zeit fiel mir nicht mehr ein, als den Anwendern zu raten, die betroffenen Sensoren mit dem Parameter –blacklist zu ignorieren. Allerdings tauchte noch ein weiterer Fehler bei Gen8-Servern auf, der ein echter Showstopper war: Use of uninitialized value in lc at ./check_hpasm line 3581. Argument "\0\0\0\0\0\0" isn't numeric in numeric ne (!=) at ./check_hpasm line 477. Ein Kunde mit Supportvertrag spendierte mir …
Monitoring Core Benchmarks
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 in Insights
We often get asked about nagios server sizing, so we did some benchmarking. Here are the results. Test Setup To get proper results all tests were made on the same system: Debian 6 Squeeze Virtual Machine based on VMware 512MB Ram 2x2.5GHz Xeon 16gb disk All tests were made with a loaded livestatus module to fetch actual numbers of executed checks. The test setup was based on OMD so it contains some best practice tuning already like using a ram disk, large installation tweaks and disabled environment macros. We created different sites for each test environment: Nagios 3.2.3 Nagios 4 (alpha version) Icinga 1.7.2 Mod-Gearman 1.3.8 Test Plugins In order to meassure the overhead of different cores, we used several test plugins. Perl plugins were tested with and without embedded perl for cores …
GOTO Conference Aarhus 2012 (part 2)
Monday, October 15, 2012 in Insights
I just returned from the GOTO Aarhus 2012 conference. Here’s some of my highlights: Up up and Out: Scaling software with Akka / Jonas Bonér Jonas Bonér was presenting a good introduction to Akka. Akka is inspired by the Actor model of Erlang, brought it to the JVM and seems to have expanded on that a bit. The idea of an actor “becoming” something completely different by stacking and popping behaviors was new to me. But I am sure that a seasoned Erlang programmer knows how to do this in Erlang as well (although maybe not in such a nice way as Akka allows to). Anyway you should have a look at the actor model because “concurrency in Java is broken” as Jonas put it. I think this it the way to go for heavily concurrent applications. Performance wise Akka is pretty impressive. According to their …
GOTO Conference Aarhus 2012
Monday, October 08, 2012 in Insights
This year was the first time I went to a GOTO conference, i.e. GOTO Aarhus 2012. Traveling to Denmark took me remarkably long (12 hours), but this is probably due to my inability in effectively route planning (though it would be cool, if somebody could point me how to go faster from Nuremberg, Germany to Aarhus, Denmark. Just in case ;-). This blog sums up my impressions of this developer event. There has been several big themes on the conference. I summarize my opinion on some of them. NoSQL NoSQL, although confessely a terrible naming, has arrived. At least five major vendors with their products (Cassandra, Riak, neo4j, MongoDB, CouchBase) where highly present at the conference booth. I didn’t attended much of the talks, but a very good overview of what is “NoSQL” is all about (including …
OMD 0.56 für Raspberry Pi ist fertig.
Thursday, October 04, 2012 in Insights
Während der letzten Wochen habe ich viel Geduld aufgebracht, um auf meinem neuen Raspberry Pi die Open Monitoring Distribution zu bauen und zuletzt ein Debian-Install-Paket zu erstellen. Geduld deshalb, weil ein “make” schon mal einen Tag und mehr läuft. Wenn dann immer wieder Anpassungen im Build-Prozess für diese spezielle Hardware nötig sind, zieht sich das ganze Unternehmen ordentlich in die Länge. Aber nun ist es überstanden und die Version 0.56 von OMD kann auf dem Raspberry Pi installiert werden. Wer es selber mal erleben möchte, wie zäh sich das Bauen von OMD anfühlt, kann sich das Ergebnis meiner Portierung von https://github.com/lausser/ompistro herunterladen und den Compiler anschmeissen. Alle anderen können OMD einfach per deb-Paket installieren. Dazu wird (in Anlehnungen an …
Webcast "Java Monitoring in der Praxis – Jmx4Perl / Jolokia"
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 in Insights
Am Donnerstag senden wir einen Webcast rund um das Thema Java Monitoring mit Nagios im Allgemeinen und dem Plugin hier beheimateten check_jmx4perl im Speziellen. Roland Huß als Referent und Author von jmx4perl und Gerhard Laußer als Moderator erklären 45 Minuten, wie man Nagios am besten mit JEE Servern zusammenbekommt: Was ist JMX und warum ist JMX mit Nagios so schwer zu überwachen? Java Monitoring Extensions – ein Kurzeinführung Probleme bei der Anbindung von Java Applikationsservern mit JMX an Nagios Jmx4Perl – Architektur und Vorteile Das Nagios Plugin ‘check_jmx4perl’ Die Tools ‘jp4sh’, ‘jmx4perl’ und ‚jolokia’ Sinnvolle Metriken für die Nagios-Überwachung Die Anmeldung zu diesem kostenfreien Webcast und weitere Details dazu finden sich hier.
Create a Pinned Thruk App Tab in Firefox
Thursday, September 06, 2012 in Insights
Since Version 1.46 of Thruk the number of problems can be dynamically viewed in Thruks favicon. This is quite handy for creating a pinned app tab in Firefox. Step1 Open your problems view and adjust the filter to hide useless problems or things you don't want to bother you. Then click on the preferences button on the top right. Step2 Then enable the problems counter. The counter is bound to the current page, so if you leave the problems page, you will get the counter for that page. Make sure you always have the problems page open. Step3 Right clicking on the tab bar and selecting "Pin as App Tab" converts your tab into an app tab which is smaller and does not waste space in your tab bar but is still visible all the time. Step4 Et voilá, you now have a Thruk App Tab in your Firefox.
Raspberry Pi mit Spiegel-Sticks
Wednesday, August 29, 2012 in Insights
In diesem Post wird gezeigt, wie man einen Raspberry Pi Miniatur-Computer mit einem Root-Filesystem ausstattet, das auf zwei gespiegelten USB-Sticks liegt. Der Raspberry Pi (Modell B) wird mit einem SD-Karten-Leser und zwei USB-Ports geliefert. Das Betriebssystem Raspbian, eine Variante von Debian, wird als Image heruntergeladen und auf eine SD-Karte kopiert. Diese enthält danach zwei Partitionen, eine für das /boot- und eine für das /-Filesystem. Nach dem Booten zeigt sich folgendes Bild: root@raspberrypi:~# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 15118600 4141560 10209048 29% / /dev/root 15118600 4141560 10209048 29% / tmpfs 23656 312 23344 2% /run tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock tmpfs 47312 0 47312 0% /tmp tmpfs 10240 0 10240 0% /dev tmpfs 47312 0 47312 0% /run/shm …
Start Thruk Automatically
Monday, August 27, 2012 in Insights
Thruk uses the mod_fcgid apache module which makes Thruk start on the first request. The user then gets a “waiting” page till the fastcgi server has started. When using Thruk all the time, there is no reason to wait till someone makes the first request and you can just fire up the init script after apache starts. In normal installations there is an rc script in /etc/init.d/thruk which fakes a request and makes the fastcgi server start. root@mo:~ #> /etc/init.d/thruk start Starting thruk.........(10492) OK In OMD its even easier, latest snapshots have so called ‘init-hooks’ which are executed after the rc script. You need to create two files in your site: etc/init-hooks.d/apache-reload-post One of them can be a symlink, because both files will have the same content: #!/bin/sh # check return …
Thruk 1.36 Released
Thursday, July 19, 2012 in Insights
Version 1.36 of the Thruk monitoring gui has just been released. The changelog is quite huge this time. There is a new dashboard plugin called the ‘Panorama View’ Addon. There are a lot more reports included now. And finally there is a plugin manager included in the config tool which lets you easily manage your plugins and addons. Panaorama View Dashboard The 'Panorama' plugin is a nice, fully customizable dashboard allowing you to build your own panorama views. There are quite a few, so called Panlets already and there are a lot more to come. Besides the normal panlets, there is a generic url panlet which lets you include any page (currently only from the same origin). You choose to only view a part of a page by using a css selector. Custom Reports Every page can be put into a report from …