Re: [nv-l] Disk and load monitoring on Linux and Windows Servers

[Leslie Clark <lclark@us.ibm.com>]

You are off to a great start. Now you
just need to find some mib variables that the servers you are monitoring
can respond to. They will probably be proprietary. The MIB-II structure
was designed with network equipment in mind, not servers. So there really
isn't a standard way of providing that information. Well, there is a standard,
and you tried that, but you know how server software vendors are. They
have to be different, and try to become the defacto standard. I suspect
that nagios was using a variety of different mib variables inside the various
plugins.  No plugins here, but the people on this list can probably
tell you which mibs they use for different kinds of servers. You should
also search the archives of this list, because this subject comes up regularly.
 http://lists.skills-1st.co.uk/mharc/html/nv-l/

Some basic guidance:

The basic SNMP that comes with Microsoft
operating systems won't know much besides its own name. When it is configured
on the servers, the admin needs to 'check all the boxes' to get more of
the MIB-II information (address tables, etc). Beyond that, most customers
I've visited have something running on them, like Dell OpenManage, or IBM
Director. These management agents have SNMP subagents. They know about
RAID and all that. They even have some mibs in common. 

In the Mib Browser, you can pull the
MIB-II mgmt hosts branch and see if your intended target servers know anything
about that. They might,or they might not. Then take a walk under the private
branch. They may know a lot in that area if they have one of those agents
on them. Next you will want to find the mib files that turn all of those
dotted decimal identifiers to words, so you know what they are. The mib
files are probably on the CDs that the management agents came on, and may
even be loaded on the target servers somewhere. They are also generally
available from mibdepot.com.  That's a really useful, if hard to navigate,
website. So next you will be reading up on loading mibs. 

You will find that different kinds of
servers have different capabilities when it comes to reporting their status.
 You might make good use of Smartsets to define groups of the same
type. When you define data collection and thresholding, you can use one
mib _expression_ for one Smartset and another mib _expression_ for another
Smartset. 


Cordially,

Leslie A. Clark
IBM Global Services - Systems Mgmt & Networking
(248) 552-4968 Voicemail, Fax, Pager

Samuel Moñux <smonux@gmail.com>
Sent by: owner-nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com

05/25/2005 12:33 PM

Please respond to
nv-l

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Subject	[nv-l] Disk and load monitoring on Linux and Windows Servers

Hi everyone,

I'm starting the deployment (planning the deployment to be more
accurate) of Tivoli Netview in an mixed environment of Linux, OpenBSD
and Windows servers, Cisco routers and switches, and RadioFrequency
terminals and antennas.

Due my lack of expertise with "true" NMS's, I'm trying to reach
with
Netview the same level of functionality that Nagios has given us by
now, and in subsequent iterations I'll explore all the power of
Netview.

So, I have installed Tivoli Netview on an Suse Linux Enterprise Server
9, readed (most of) the Unix Administrator's guide and done some basic
setup.

Just now I'm trying to get notifications of high levels of load and
disk usage. Theorically, doesn't seem too difficult. I've added this
_expression_ on mibExpr.conf

HDiskUtil \
"(hrStorageUsed / hrStorageSize) * 100"  \
        .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.6. \
        .1.3.6.1.2.1.25.2.3.1.5. / \
        100 *

and using the Motif GUI, this to snmpCol.conf

MIB HDiskUtil HDiskUtil units _expression_ R
O Servidores_windows 60 90.000000 90.000000 A s 58720263 LIST 0

This doesn't work on Windows boxes and don't know why. But, it's
worse. Linux and OpenBSD boxes doesn't have hrStorageUsed at all on
their mib-2 tree. To get diskusage relevant OID's I have to look under
enterprises.ucdavis.

So, I'm a bit disoriented, Which is the "standard" way of deal
with
net-snmp and Window implementations?. I'm specially interested on get
notifications of load, disk usage, and vital processes liveness.

Sorry if my question is too simplistic. I'll read any documentation
you point me at. I'm avid of detailed docs.

Thanks in advance,

Samuel