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
Comments:
  1. 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!
==================
  2. 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
  3. Nagios XI 2014-R1 upgrade did not replace /etc/sysconfig/iptables on the Linux server, which the original RC3 candidate did.

  4. Nagios XI system component status finally started the performance grapher "NPCD".

  5. The Host Status Detail menu includes Capacity Planning reports. Here is an example of this great feature:
  6. The URL within GUI interface that points to information about Network Analyzer shows HTML error 404:

    Learn More About Network Analyzer

    7. Ubuntu 14 NRPE Agent Installation Hack

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. 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:

The other tests that were conducted for the release candidate version will be reassessed:

https://www.circlingcycle.com.au/fun-projects/Nagios-XI-2014-R1.0RC3-brief-installation-testing-May2014