Booklet #19, Configuration Management with Bcfg2, by Narayan Desai and Cory Lueninghoener, is now online for members and available for purchase. Whether you’re wondering which configuration management tool—if any—is for you, or you’ve settled on Bcfg2 and are already deploying it, this booklet by Bcfg2 authors Narayan Desai and Cory Lueninghoener will provide you with valuable insights and advice. Take a look now!
Do you know someone who has gone above and beyond to contribute to the system
administration field? How about a mentor in the SAGE community? Please
submit a nomination for the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award or
the Chuck Yerkes Award.
Send nominations to sageawards@sage.org.
The LISA ‘08 workshop series features 3 days of focused discussion on a variety of topics including virtual infrastructures.
Virtual machines, networking, and storage are the technologies that underpin the new generation of data centers and support cloud computing. This LISA workshop is a new opportunity to spend a day discussing the configuration and management of virtual infrastructures with experts in both research and practice. While it is intended primarily for those with experience in the area, the workshop is also open to anyone with experience with more traditional infrastructures who is interested in learning more about this topic. The number of places is limited and attendance is by invitation only; More details can be found here.
The LISA ‘08 Virtual Infrastructures Workshop, taking place November 11, 2008, will be led by Paul Anderson, University of Edinburgh.
Find out more about this and other workshops at LISA ‘08 here.
Check out the LISA ‘08 blog for the latest updates and behind-the-scenes information about the 22nd Large Installation System Administration Conference.
Third in a three-part series, guest blogger and ;login: author, Matthew Sacks, presents his review of Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools. Matthew looked at Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic.
Next up, Hyperic.
Why we tested these:
There are a number of open source monitoring tools out there boasting large feature-sets and powerful management utilities that go beyond the traditional MRTG, Cacti, or Nagios installation. These monitoring tools utilize these classic open source utilities and build on them to cultivate a full-features enterprise-class monitoring solution. Although these are not the only monitoring tools out there, they are the key players in the open source enterprise monitoring arena.
What was rated:
– Installation process
– Ease of configuration
– Number of features
– Documentation
And now on to the review: Hyperic
Installation:
Hyperic HQ’s installation is straightforward, with the execution of a few simple shell scripts and prompts for configuration data, and the Hyperic server is up and running. Hyperic did well on this installation process by making it very smooth and streamlined. Hyperic requires the installation of an agent on hosts to be monitored. This is an extra configuration step and overhead on the machine, although very minimal, but it allows for seamless collection of information on monitored servers and hosts.
Configuration:
Hyperic is configured by installing an agent on the target host; and then running an auto-discovery from within Hyperic HQ. Aside from the agent installation, most of the configuration within Hyperic is organizing servers into groups and categorizing them. Hyperic can be configured with Nagios as well. Hyperic also has an alerting scheme where events can notify via email, SMS, or SNMP trap. Setting up Hyperic and configuring the agents is mostly a breeze, unless the user requires more fine-grained features. This is the beauty of having an agent-based monitoring tool.
Features:
The key word with Hyperic is graphing. The amount of data available for graphing from the Hyperic agent can only be described as bountiful. The agent returns detailed information for the processes and their attributes. For example, when monitoring a PostGres database, metrics are collected and graphed down to the availability, disk space, index space, rows per minute, scans per minute for each individual table! Hyperic does an excellent job of automatically collecting a great deal of information with little to no configuration required by the user. Ease of use is Hyperic’s strong point.
Many application servers, databases, and other system services are natively supported in the Hyperic HQ distribution, but if that doesn’t cut it, Hyperic offers a full-featured plug-in framework that extends its functionality.
Conclusion:
Hyperic is simple to configure. It has a large amount of information available for graphing, alerting, and a very well designed user interface that allows for easy navigation. One of the downsides to Hyperic is that there is a wealth of information, but graphing and saving this information isn’t as easily locatable to the user as it could be.
Although discovery is limited to servers containing agents, it provides a level of detailed information that is not available through other monitoring tools that use SNMP or SSH to collect information from hosts and devices. The graph displays in Hyperic are easily readable. Hyperic is full-featured, well-designed, and focused on performance and availability.
Hyperic HQ Community Edition is available here.
About the author:
Matthew Sacks works as a systems administrator. His focus is network, systems, and application performance tuning.
SAGE Booklet #17, LCFG: A Practical Tool for System Configuration, written by the author of LCFG, Paul Anderson, is now online for members and available for purchase.
The booklet offers nearly 100 pages packed with information, this booklet answers your questions, from “Is LCFG for you?” through “How much should I automate?” to “What’s planned next?” Includes Appendixes on “Bootstrapping an LCFG Installation,” “Buildtools,” and “The Linux Installroot.”
Find out more about the SAGE booklets here.
Second in a three-part series, guest blogger and ;login: author, Matthew Sacks, presents his review of Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools. Matthew looked at Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic. Next up, GroundWork.
Why we tested these:
There are a number of open source monitoring tools out there boasting large feature-sets and powerful management utilities that go beyond the traditional MRTG, Cacti, or Nagios installation. These monitoring tools utilize these classic open source utilities and build on them to cultivate a full-features enterprise-class monitoring solution. Although these are not the only monitoring tools out there, they are the key players in the open source enterprise monitoring arena.
What was rated:
– Installation process
– Ease of configuration
– Number of features
– Documentation
And now on to the review: GroundWork
Overview:
GroundWork Monitor Community Edition [www.groundworkopensource.com] is an enterprise monitoring suite that is based on the open source Nagios project. It leverages the powerful network and systems monitoring of Nagios and the graphing power of Cacti and MRTG.
Installation:
The installation process of GroundWork was not exactly smooth, to put it nicely. Although the configuration was not difficult to implement, it did require a lot of manual steps in order to get it running. GroundWork ships with a graphical installer script that guides the installation; however, even with the installer script there is a lot of manual configuration in between configuration screens. Once installed, configuration becomes a snap.
Configuration:
The first thing noticed about GroundWork is an excellent user interface. Navigation through the different interfaces of GroundWork is intuitive and pleasant. The auto-discovery feature is simple to use and fast. Once a discovery is executed, the items discovered appear for modifying details and for inputting them into the GroundWork database for monitoring. GroundWork has done an excellent job at layering an interface for setting up the underlying Nagios configuration. Configuration of services, profiles, and hosts is relatively simple while leveraged with a fine-grained level of monitoring detail. The configuration of the underlying Nagios engine has been simplified in GroundWork and it is easy to configure new services, profiles, hosts, and alerts.
Features:
GroundWork’s strong point is fine-grained monitoring metrics for individual services, hosts, and performance metrics that the Nagios engine provides. The reporting application in GroundWork is easy to use and can generate reports based on all hosts in the network and allows for a quick overview of host health in a network with many servers in it. The documentation and help section found in the GroundWork application was well written and organized. The performance graphing utility included needs a bit of work. Extending the metrics, which it can collect, takes a bit of work through the performance configuration administration.
Conclusion:
GroundWork provides a beautiful graphical interface for configuring a Nagios-based enterprise monitor. It simplifies the process, and adds an easy to use interface for configuring a complex and fine-grained application such as Nagios. GroundWork has done an excellent job at taming this normally configuration-intensive beast. GroundWork allows for advanced monitoring of a large network. Nagios is heavily configuration-intensive and GroundWork has made this process much easier with their beautiful interface. GroundWork is the most flexible of the monitoring tools in this review allowing much granularity in terms of what can be modified within the configuration and the application itself.
GroundWork Community Edition is available here.
About the author:
Matthew Sacks works as a systems administrator. His focus is network, systems, and application performance tuning.
First in a three-part series, guest blogger and ;login: author, Matthew Sacks, presents his review of Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools. Matthew looked at Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic. The first part will be a review of Zenoss.
Why we tested these:
There are a number of open source monitoring tools out there boasting large feature-sets and powerful management utilities that go beyond the traditional MRTG, Cacti, or Nagios installation. These monitoring tools utilize these classic open source utilities and build on them to cultivate a full-features enterprise-class monitoring solution. Although these are not the only monitoring tools out there, they are the key players in the open source enterprise monitoring arena.
What was rated:
– Installation process
– Ease of configuration
– Number of features
– Documentation
And now on to the review: Zenoss
Overview:
Zenoss is an open source enterprise monitoring application that is based off of MRTG the open source graphing and trending utility. Zenoss is a full-featured web-based monitoring console that allows one to easily trend and graph performance, alert and track events, and trend availability over time.
Installation:
Installation is a breeze with Zenoss. Out of the three enterprise monitoring utilities reviewed, Zenoss was by far the easiest and least painful to install. Simply run the installer, choose an installation directory and MySQL root password, and everything is installed through the installer script.
Configuration:
The catch to the super-simple installation process is that Zenoss takes a fair amount of work to get it configured to start monitoring an infrastructure. Luckily, Zenoss has a good discovery utility that maps out the network and gives the administrator a good point of reference for building out their infrastructure within Zenoss. The different properties and classifications methods within Zenoss are rather complex and non-intuitive at first; however, once configured, the amount of detail and extensibility Zenoss offers comes in handy in large, complex deployments. Zenoss uses SNMP as its primary method for collecting information from servers and devices. Zenoss does an excellent job of automatically discovering and populating information about a server or device. It does take a bit of tuning in terms of categorizing servers by location, hardware, and processes, etc. However, once this is done, this allows for a very useful feature set that can be leveraged against the organized data.
Features:
Besides standard reporting, alerting, and performance graphing, Zenoss has some nice features available that make enterprise monitoring a bit more powerful. Modeling plugins that ship with Zenoss allow for automatic population of information about a given device at the click of a button. This is a very powerful feature without the use of a software agent. Event correlation mappings are available when two or more events occur that serve as a smart engine for identifying a particular event.
Zenoss allows for native graphing of Linux server performance through the UCD-SNMP MIB and automatically creates graphs for load average, CPU, and memory. This can be extended through the usage of ZenPacks that has an API for easily extending the functionality of Zenoss. Zenoss has a few packs for monitoring Java processes (such as Heap size, Garbage Collection, etc), Apache Web servers, and Dell Hardware.
Conclusion:
Zenoss wins over the other monitoring solutions in ease of installation; although configuration is a bit trickier, and requires careful reading of the documentation in order to fully leverage its powerful classification and categorization features. The documentation is well thought out and easy to follow for configuring Zenoss. The agent-less deployment, network discovery, and device-modeling features work well within Zenoss with little to no configuration. The ZenPack extensions are a big plus in extending Zenoss as well as for monitoring more detailed information.
Zenoss Core is available here.
About the author:
Matthew Sacks works as a systems administrator. His focus is network, systems, and application performance tuning.
Now back for a return engagement: the SAGE Blog. We’ll be bringing you the announcements of sysadmin events as well as guest bloggers, tips and tricks, and a few sneak peaks of upcoming booklets.
Want to meet with other SAGE members? SAGE has groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. Connect with other members and keep up to date on the latest SAGE developments. Join today!
Join the SAGE LinkedIn group here.
Join the SAGE Facebook group here.
Next up on the blog: a 3-part series on monitoring tools by guest blogger and :login; author, Matthew Sacks.
Stay tuned!
Powered by WordPress