Yesterday I’ve attended the Nagios World Conference Europe hosted in Bozen (Italy) by Wurth-Phoenix, so as first thing thanks to Wurst-Phoenix for the organization this meeting, for the free access provided to the event , and for the good meal that we have enjoyed.
These are some notes I’ve took during the meeting.
Current And Future Developments In Nagios by Ethan Galstad
Ethan Galstad it’s the Nagios founder and President Nagios Enterprises , in it’s presentation Ethan has touched many points, this is a small list of what i’ve found more interesting:
– V-Shell a new Web graphical interface wrote from 0 in PHP for nagios-core (the open source Nagios solution). This new interface is designed to be lightweight, easy to install and use, and customizable and is available for download on Nagios Exchange (the portal for nagios plugins).
– Nagios Montage : That’s the name for a new project of Nagios enterprise, The idea behind it is to create something that will let new users get started using Nagios immediately, without the hassle of installation, as well as highlighting a number of popular add-ons right off the bat. This will be accomplished by distributing a pre-built virtual appliance with everything installed, along with a default configuration that shows off a variety of capabilities. This virtual machine image is currently slated to include Nagios Core, the Nagios Plugins, the Exfoliation theme, NagVis, the NRPE plugin, Business Process Intelligence, NSCA, nagiosgraph, NRDP, V-Shell, and NagiosQL as a base, possibly with more to be added. This shows of both things that have been around for a long time, like Core, the plugins, and NagVis, as well as some relatively new projects like BPI and V-Shell, plus the latest releases of everything such as the brand new NagiosQL 3.1.
– A new web interface ( Nagios CCM – Core Config Manager) for editing the Nagios configuration from the web, this will use the NagiosQL backend but will have a new Web front end wrote from Nagios Enterprise to improve the usability.
– Nagios BPI (Business Process Intelligence) is a new Open Source addon developed by Nagios Enterprises that makes visualizing and monitoring business processes easy. Nagios BPI features a clean interface that utilizes new web technologies and offers users powerful insight into the operational status of high-level business processes and services. A demo video it’s available here
– New training online by Nagios Enterprise e certification for Nagios administration.
Open Source Monitoring in larger Enterprises by Ton Voon
Ton Voon it’s Nagios Plugin developer, Opsview Technical Architect Opsera Limited (UK).
Ton gave a presentation graphically very appealing on challenges of a large scale monitoring or for very large and complex environments.
On the technology side he shows some information on Opsview (product I mentioned briefly in a previous article) :
– Opsview adds a managment interface to Nagios and integrates some of the most common/used addons
– Opsview is based on Nagios but opsera patch the original Nagios code, at the moment there are around 40 patches in the last Opsview release.
– Opsview has a fast release cycle, with around 2 release at month, this is a feature of the product, they want to insert new feature and bug fixes quickly in the product.
For a Screencast made by Ton voon and more info check also their official page
Open Source System Management for the University of Bologna by Stefano Benassi – Camillo Toselli
Stefano and Camillo are System/network administrators at the University of Bologna.
In their presentation they have shown the topology of Almanet the academic network that connect the various university points and their monitoring solution with Neteye.
Neteye it’s an appliance built by Wurth-Phoenix and its goal is the integration of Nagios, Cacti, OSC Inventory, Asset Management and OTRS.
The interesting part of this solution it’s the integration of the various open source software made by Wurth-Phoenix.
If you search for a complete solution and don’t want to spend time in the set up all these software, perhaps this solution could be useful.
The new ITIL® V3 Compliant OTRS ITSM 3.0 by Jens Bothe
Jens Bothe, it’s a Senior Consultant OTRS AG (GER)
OTRS it’s mainly a TTS/Servicedesk solution but in the latest release include some extra module for ITIL compliance, like a CMDB and a change workflow.
In this presentation Jens presented how the solution can be integrated with Nagios, so an incident in Nagios automatically create a Ticket in OTRS, when someone lock (so it take in charge) the ticket the Nagios check it’s automatically put in Ack.
There is also a change management workflow ready, you can start a change from any ticket of incidents so you can use it in your ITIL compliant process.
This software it’s also implemented in the neteye appliance, in the Enterprise Version.
Application Latency Monitoring with ntop, nProbe and NetFlow by Luca Deri
Luca Deri, is ntop Founder (I)
For an introduction to Ntop, you can also check a previous article.
In his presentation luca talked about the concept of Application latency, from the ntop blog:
The application latency is the time taken by a server to process a request. nProbe computes it as the time from the first packet with payload sent by the client, and the time of the first response packet following client’s request. If you want to know the whole processing time (from first to last byte of request plus response) you can see it from the flow duration. In the above figure you can see how this works in the case of HTTP. Please note that for same protocols, application latency computation is meaningful (e.g. HTTP, DNS), whereas for others (e.g. SSH, FTP) is not.”
Nprobe it’s an Extensible NetFlow v5/v9/IPFIX GPL Probe for IPv4/v6, check the official page for a lot of informations about this tool.
Nbox it’s an appliance embedding ntop and nProbe on a Generic x86 PC.
An interesting thing is that Neteye can gather all the information collected and show/elaborate them.
The new Linux Standard DRBD by Martin Loschwitz
Real Time Cluster Synchronisation for more Reliability in High Availability Systems
Martin Loschwitz, Consultant Linbit (A)
Martin made a great presentation of DRBD (i’ve made an introduction of this software here), but i’ve really not understood
1) Why he’s at the Nagios conference Europe
2) Why it’s been presented like “The innovative new standard DRBD”
I use DRBD from many years and it’s always been really useful and reliable, it’s been included in the standard kernel in the release 2.6.33 and i really suggest this solution as cheaper solution compared to San/NAS.
if you don’t know what’s a DRBD, check this introduction:
An interesting news, is that he promised (!) that in release 8.5 there will be a synchronization from a master to N node, and this open a new series of possibility, the bad news is that release date is not yet announced.
Conclusions
An interesting event, free but with speakers highly trained in their fields.
I’ve discovered the Neteye appliance, some interesting news of Nagios and OTRS a software that i did not know before.
Ntop and DRBD presentations have been highly technical with interesting details of implementation gave from the 2 speakers.
So in conclusion thanks again to Wurth-Phoenix, if you are in the area i suggest you to attend to the event next year.
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Cogliamo l’occasione per ringraziare tutti i relatori, partecipanti e organizzatori della Nagios World Conference Europe 2011, che anche quest’anno hanno contribuito al grande successo riscontrato nel corso dell’evento.
Vi informo che è possibile scaricare le presentazioni dei relatori sul nostro sito internet, dove è possibile anche visualizzare le foto scattate durante la conferenza.
A breve vi comunicheremo quando verranno resi disponibili i video delle presentazioni nonchè le interviste ai partecipanti e ai relatori, che hanno condiviso le loro impressioni.