Nagios XI 2014-R1 brief installation testing May 2014
Scenario on the test network for a customer:- Main server is CentOS 6.5 on X84_64 platform.
- Original version installed Nagios XI 2014R1.0RC3 wth Standard Edition license.
- Upgrade to full official release Nagios XI 2014R1 with Standard Edition license.
- The server runs four KVM virtual machines:
Solaris 11.1 OpenSUSE 13.1 Oracle Linux 6.5 Ubuntu 14.04
- The upgrade process was simple, efficient, and error-free:
Checking objects... Checked 81 services. Checked 6 hosts. Checked 1 host groups. Checked 0 service groups. Checked 2 contacts. Checked 2 contact groups. Checked 115 commands. Checked 8 time periods. Checked 0 host escalations. Checked 0 service escalations. Checking for circular paths... Checked 6 hosts Checked 0 service dependencies Checked 0 host dependencies Checked 8 timeperiods Checking global event handlers... Checking obsessive compulsive processor commands... Checking misc settings... Total Warnings: 0 Total Errors: 0 Things look okay - No serious problems were detected during the pre-flight check RET: 0 Running configuration check...done. Stopping nagios: .done. Starting nagios: done. Fixing php-mcrypt bug... Stopping httpd: [ OK ] Starting httpd: [Fri May 16 10:05:00 2014] [warn] module ssl_module is already loaded, skipping [ OK ] ================== UPGRADE COMPLETED! ==================
- Memory footprint: quite low. In fact, server performance is much better with the full release than it was with the release candidate.
The following non-standard services and processes were enabled on the host server when Nagios XI was installed:
nagios nagiosxi ndo2db nrpe postgresql mrtg
- Nagios XI 2014-R1 upgrade did not replace /etc/sysconfig/iptables on the Linux server, which the original RC3 candidate did.
-
Nagios XI system component status finally started the performance grapher "NPCD".
-
The Host Status Detail menu includes Capacity Planning reports. Here is an example of this great feature:
- The URL within GUI interface that points to information about Network Analyzer shows HTML error 404: Ubuntu 14 NRPE Agent Installation Hack
- Ubuntu installation worked without errors but the monitoring reported problem with missing iostat command. By default, Ubuntu does not install it, so the solution was:
# apt-get install sysstat
Oracle Linux 6 NRPE Agent Installation Hack - Although Oracle Linux is not officially supported, the actual installation of NRPE agent was very simple. I used the Red Hat linux-nrpe-agent and made small change in script fullinstall from:
# Check OS major version case "$dist" in el5 | el6 ) : do nothing ;; fedora9|fedora10|fedora11|fedora12|fedora13|fedora14|fedora15 ) : do nothing ;; * ) echo "$dist is not currently supported. Please use Red Hat or CentOS versions 5 or 6." >&2 exit 1 esac
to:# Check OS major version case "$dist" in el5 | el6 ) : do nothing ;; fedora9|fedora10|fedora11|fedora12|fedora13|fedora14|fedora15 ) : do nothing ;; oracleserver5*|oracleserver6* ) : do nothing ;; * ) echo "$dist is not currently supported. Please use Red Hat or CentOS versions 5 or 6." >&2 exit 1 esac
OpenSUSE 13 NRPE Agent Installation Hack - Although OpenSUSE and SUSE are not officially supported, the actual installation of NRPE agent was relatively simple. I used the Red Hat linux-nrpe-agent and made small changes in scripts fullinstall, 0-yum, 1-prereqs, 2-usergroups, 4-firewall.
Some major notes to take into account:
- SUSE uses /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 configuration file.
- SUSE command adduser does not have option "-n".
- SUSE does not have option iptables for service. Instead, the services are named SuSEfirewall2 and SuSEfirewall2_init.
- SUSE does not use yum package manager by default. I converted the NRPE scripts to use Zypper.
- Service Status Detail now reports that command check_apt is not defined. Not a major problem until I investigate how to disable it as it does not apply to SUSE distributions. For the moment, I will disable notifications for it.
- Service Status Detail now reports that ssh status cannot be read because NRPE cannot read output. I debuged it and found the cause. The test performed by Nagios was:
2014-05-16T21:02:48.102722+10:00 suse13-vm2 sudo: nagios : TTY=unknown ; PWD=/ ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_init_service ssh
On SUSE servers, the correct syntax is:# service sshd status sshd.service - OpenSSH Daemon Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/sshd.service; enabled) Active: active (running) since Fri 2014-05-16 20:45:11 EST; 13min ago Process: 25261 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/sshd-gen-keys-start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 25265 (sshd) CGroup: /system.slice/sshd.service `-25265 /usr/sbin/sshd -D May 16 20:45:11 suse13-vm2 systemd[1]: Starting OpenSSH Daemon... ...
To make the correct changes, I edited /usr/local/nagios/etc/services/suse13-vm2.cfg on Nagios XI server.
Overall, I managed to install NRPE agent on OpenSUSE 13.1 and Oracle Linux 6.5 clients, with a bit of work:

