Russell and Michael, thank you for your thoughtful responses. Please excuse, and I apologize for, my whiny rant.
I just bought Wolfgang's book as well as Pro Puppet. I couldn't find my old Nagios book, I can't even remember the name of the book it was hard copy with a yellow cover. After a few years in Afghanistan doing information assurance for DoD, I find myself back in the Linux world. So I really have forgotten more than I remember. The environment I'm in involves bringing back in-house many LAMP servers, which had been outsourced for years, into a new PCI/DSS network. They're a windows centric company, there was no existing Linux environment setup, are trying to force the 'SCOM monitoring' way on Linux, and since they're windows centric they see Linux as the 'red headed step child'. I have an up-hill battle to say the least. Anyway, I want to thank you again for your response and I look forward to being a less whiny and more helpful contributor. --Jim -----Original Message----- From: Michael Friedrich [mailto:michael.friedr...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2013 5:52 AM To: icinga-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [icinga-users] Noob to icinga but not nagios On 20.04.2013 02:53, Jim Miller wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > Please don't spam me too much for sending this email. It's been a few > years since I've setup nagios and I've forgotten more than I remember. > I decided to go with icinga over nagios because of all the hard work > that's gone into the fork. > > I would really like to just buy a good book that documents 'best > practices' for setting up icinga. Like a good/best practice for > setting up contacts, notifications, remote hosts, services, nrpe, etc. > etc. I'm REALLY not trying to shirk reading the online docs which are > good but a little too general and I just don't have time with all my > other tasks. > basically, the nagios book by wolfgang barth is still the best reference in getting started. but since you remarked that you're familiar with nagios and it's setup, you'll likely have the best weapons already available. in terms of reading the docs - of course they can only provide the more generic overview, and not getting into the details of your very own environment. i had a great discussion on that topic yesterday with a guy from puppetlabs (puppet camp in nuremberg, github hosting the drinks in the evening) - merely, you need to know what to monitor to actually install the monitoring, without that idea and even design, monitoring will be rather useless. in regard of a good documentation and best practices howtos, it's rather difficult to find the "ideal way", as there is a variety of tools, alternatives, even workarounds to choose from. And on the other side - different ways to access the data (getting it from your puppetdb, use foreman, have it organised in your cmdb like verbosy, or even, the simple idea - an excel sheet with all the required information). different ways to transport the data from the clients to the icinga server. and last but not least - the perfect plugin or agent for all of that. maybe there are books out there, trying to show you the way. i even tried to push some information onto the "beginners" guide on the docs [0] and the wiki [1]. But yes, those are not sufficient, they are starters into the right direction. though, and that's my personal opinion, since it's my dayjob to provide such too, there are companies out there providing professional support and help on doing more with your monitoring system, even getting the smallest piece to work, even when there's no agent/plugin/data api available (at least you thought so from the documentation). i'm not saying that this is the only way to go, but in 4 years of doing icinga community support next to active development, i have to admit that it's very very hard to provide information on the project how do it right on an unknown system. of course, people may share their experience on the various platforms, and it may help you getting your things to work, but in the end, it highly depends on your time. my personal advise is still - if you do not have the time to make it work yourself, insert coins and let others do their job. but first, try to gather some knowledge and ideas, like you just did. so for the topic itsself - you may be a "noob" in regards of the new icinga components (web and reporting), but not really on the fork-compatible nagios style configuration. still, you may find some additional things on icinga (like the address6 field for hosts, or the module definition for idoutils). or idoutils itsself, providing the database backend used for web and reporting, supporting more than just mysql (postgresql and oracle). or even, that Icinga Classic UI let's you send multiple commands at once, and many other improvements you do not want to miss on the daily work. and last but not least, that you can choose between Classic UI and Web, even run them side by side. monitoring is all about "when the alert rushes in, i need to handle it. and not having a click orgy identifying the actual problem." in the end - if you do own a good nagios book, consult it in terms of configuration management. if you think that you want to try something new, let puppet or chef generate your configuration. or give one of the configuration tools out there a shot - like lconf (ldap based) or nconf/nagiosql (mysql based). if you got detailed questions on those topics, i'm pretty sure there are plenty of users out there, sharing their experience. and if not, most the existing nagios howtos out there still work with icinga, some with slight adaptions (but not patches, as you may find many on icinga already itsself [2]). kind regards, Michael [0] http://docs.icinga.org/latest/en/beginners.html [1] https://wiki.icinga.org/display/howtos/Advice+for+Beginners [2] https://wiki.icinga.org/display/Dev/Bug+and+Feature+Comparison > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced > analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building > apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use > our toolset for easy data analysis& visualization. Get a free account! > http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter > > > _______________________________________________ > icinga-users mailing list > icinga-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/icinga-users -- DI (FH) Michael Friedrich mail: michael.friedr...@gmail.com twitter: https://twitter.com/dnsmichi jabber: dnsmi...@jabber.ccc.de irc: irc.freenode.net/icinga dnsmichi icinga open source monitoring position: lead core developer url: https://www.icinga.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ icinga-users mailing list icinga-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/icinga-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ icinga-users mailing list icinga-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/icinga-users
