The monitoring section in the web menu is related to problem management and status of your network.This here you will spend most of your time when using op5 Monitor. In the monitoring section you canThis chapter will give you information about the most common parts of the monitoring part of op5 Monitor.A host can be any kind of network device, virtual device and other objects that you might reach from the op5 Montor server..Let us take a look at the Host information view and see what parts it is built upon. In the coming sections we will go through each part and learn how they can be used.
Displays brief information about the host and its surroundings like Here you can perform different commands for the host and/or all services on that host. This is comments you put there either by adding a scheduled downtime or just a comment of it own.The page links gives you a couple of short cuts to more information about this host and its services.In this view you get all kind of status information about the host. This is the most detailed view you can get over a host.Comments are designed to be short texts. If you like to add documentation, longer descriptions and so on you should consider using the do Dokuwiki on page 63 that is included in op5 Monitor.To filter comments use the filter text field above the comments. This will filter the comments in real time. To clear the filter click on the Clear button.Let us take a look at the Service information view and see what parts it is built upon. In the coming sections we will go through each part and learn how they can be used.
Quick links to other information about the service and the host it is connected to. Service information header Displays brief information about the service, host and its surroundings like Here you can see status information for the service like Here you can perform different commands for the service. These are comments you put there either by adding a scheduled downtime or just a comment of it own.The page links gives you a couple of short cuts to more information about this service and the host it is connected to.In this view you get all kind of status information about the host. This is the most detailed view you can get over a service.Comments are designed to be short texts. If you like to add documentation, longer descriptions and so on you should consider using the do Dokuwiki on page 63 that is included in op5 Monitor.As you can se everything starts with the op5-monitor server. If fw-01 is down, as shown in the picture above, all child hosts of fw-01 is considered as unreachable.The example above shows that you can use parenting to exclude a lot of unnecessary alerts and notifications. This because you can tell op5 Monitor not to send any notifications on host unreachable. That means you will only get notification about fw-01 in this case, not the hosts “below” fw-01.A host is normally placed in one or more host groups. A host group can contains any kind of hosts in any way you want to. You can use host groups toBeside just being a way of sorting hosts in you can use host groups to decide what user is supposed to be able to see what hosts. More about that in Access rights on page 118.Using host groups makes it easy to find hosts that got something in common. Let us say you have a whole bunch ofBy clicking on a host group name (the name within parentheses) in any of the host group views you will get a menu to control the host group.One of the most useful things with service groups is to group them by what useful service they are giving the users.
Example 2 Let us say you have a mail service for you customers. This mail service needs the following components to be working as it should:On the hosts listed above there are services that must be working otherwise your customer will not be able to user the email service you shall deliver to them.Place all the important services in one service group and you can then easily see if an alert and/or notification says anything about the email service in the example.By clicking on a service group name (the name within parentheses) in any of the service group views you will get a menu to control the service group.Another good way to use service groups is to create Service Level Agreement (SLA) reports based on service groups. If you take the example above and create a SLA report from it you will directly see if you can deliver your service the way you promised your customers.Much of your work with op5 Monitor is about problem handling. In the beginning when you start working with op5 Monitor normally most of the time is about configuring, tweaking and fixing problems. After a while you will see that you can start work in a proactive way instead of how it used to be.In this section we will take a look at how you can work effectively with op5 Monitor as a great help during your problem handling.A problem is classified as a soft problem until the number of checks has reached the configuredmax_check_attempts value. When max_check_attempts is reached the problem is reclassified as hard and normally op5 Monitor will send out a notification about the problem. Soft problems does not result in a notification.Alerts and notifications are two of the most important things for you as an system administrator who depend almost all your work on a monitoring tool like op5 Monitor.Alerts, alarm, notifications are called different things in most monitoring system. Here in op5 Monitor we define them like this:
An alert is when any kind of status changes on a host or a service, like: Notifications is the messages sent out to the contacts associated with the object the notification is sent about.Notifications are sent out on state changes. A notification is sent during one of the following alerts:Notifications can be sent by almost anything. The following are included by default in op5 Monitor:Of course there are a lot of other ways to send notifications like sending them to a database, ticket handling system etc.An alert can happens any time and it does not necessary needs to be associated with a notification but a notification is always associated to an alert.As you can see in the GUI there are many views in op5 Monitor to show you host and service status in. One of the most useful, for a system administrator, is the unhandled problems view.When a new problem is discovered you need to take care of it. The first thing you should do is to acknowledge the problem. There are many ways to acknowledge a problem.The most common way to acknowledge a problem is to do it in the GUI. This is easy and you will also be able to add a comment to your acknowledge. It is also the same routine no matter if it is a host or service problem you are about to acknowledge.
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4 Click Done and you will be directed back to the host you where on when you started.If you have received your notification by sms you can acknowledge it by sending a sms back to the op5 Monitor server.
2 Forward it to the op5 Monitor server (you must forward the complete sms just the way it looked like when you got it).If you now take a look at the host or service you will see that it has been acknowledged and a small comment is placed in the comment part for the object.Sometimes you might need to remove an acknowledge. Maybe you acknowledged the wrong problem or you for some reason need to stop working on it but you like more notifications to be sent out.
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Note: The comment for the acknowledge is not removed.
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4 Click on Delete selected to delete the selected scheduled downtime. To remove the scheduled downtime for both hosts and services select Delete services too..
Using scheduled downtime enables you to plan for system work ahead. When a host or service is scheduled for downtime op5 Monitor suppresses alarms for that host or service. Furthermore op5 Monitor informs you about when a host or service is scheduled for downtime through the web interface. Information about the scheduled downtime is also stored so that planned system work does not affect availability reports.You can also configure triggered downtime for hosts located below a host currently in scheduled downtime. To do this you need to have your parenting configured correctly. Read more about Parenting on page 43.Basically the Schedule Downtime view is a summary of all currently configuredscheduled downtime for hosts and services.
1 It is however easier to schedule downtime from the views Host Information, Service Information, Hostgroup Information and Servicegroup Information.As you have seen we can schedule downtime for both hosts and services. Now we will take a look at how to schedule downtime for a host and a host group. The procedure is the same for services and service groups.
You can not add a scheduled down time back in time. So if you missed to add one when you took down the host or service you can not repair it by adding scheduled downtime afterwards.When the scheduled downtime starts a notification is sent saying that the scheduled downtime has started.
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d If you chosen flexible in b then type in how long the scheduled downtime is supposed to be active.
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4 Click Submit.
5 Click Done.
1 Locate the host group you like to schedule downtime for by clicking on Hostgroup summary in the main menu under Monitoring.
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5 Click Submit.
6 Click Done.Sometimes it is necessary to remove a scheduled downtime. This can be done both before the scheduled downtime has started and during the downtime. If the scheduled downtime has been canceled before it has reached its end time a notification will be sent saying that the scheduled downtime have been canceled.
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3 Now the scheduled downtime and the comment saved when you created the scheduled downtime is removed.As a good practice you shall put your hosts and services in scheduled downtime when you are planing to take them down. Many downtime events are recurring and it is pretty easy to forget to put your objects in scheduled downtime.Let us say that you are using Citrix and you need to reboot your citrix servers once per week. This is a perfect case of when you should use a recurring downtime schedule.
1 Click Schedule downtime in the menu.
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8 Click Add schedule.
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3 Edit the fields you like to change and click Add schedule.
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3 Click Ok.The business process view is designed to combine your IT monitoring and your business service management (BSM) to give an overview of the applications and/or services that your organisation is providing either to customers or internally.The Business Process view gives an easy overview of how your Business Processes are working.
For more information about the different rules see Rules types on page 136 in op5 Administrator manual. Displays in what state the current group is in. For hosts and services the output from the op5 monitor check is displayed.op5 Monitor includes support for graphing what's known as "performance data" returned by check plugins that support this feature.Performance data can be anything that gives a more detailed picture of a particular check's performance characteristics than the OK/WARNING/CRITICAL levels that Monitor reacts to.For example, check_ping returns performance data for packet loss and round trip times. This data is stored by Monitor and used to create graphs for different time periods, such as the last 24 hours and past week. This feature can be very helpful in identifying trends or potential problems in a network.The table below describes the parts of the service overview which is where all graphs are being displayed.
Here you can quickly get the graphs of an other host. Just type in the correct name of the host and press Enter. Here you see a short information about the host. Click the host or service name to get extended details. The list shows the rest of the graphs available for this host. Just click on one of them to view the graphs of an other service.Sometimes you find a plugin you like to use but there are no graphs made from the output of the plugin. Then you need to create your own template.To create a template of your own follow the HOWTO that can be found in the documentation area of the support part at www.op5.com.This map is autogenerated by the parent/child relationships of the hosts. If a host does not have any parent it is connected directly to the “op5 Monitor Process”.op5 Monitor comes with an dokuwiki that gives you a great way of document both your environments and things needed to know about your monitored system.Of course you can also use this dokuwiki to save other kind of related information in too. This makes it easy to reach and you will ensure you have all documentation in the same place.To edit an existing page, go to the page you want to edit and select ‘Edit this page’ in the top right corner.You can format your text by using wiki markup. This consists of normal characters like asterisks, single quotes or equal signs which have a special function in the wiki, sometimes depending on their position. For example, to format a word in italic, you include it in two pairs of single quotes like ''this''.
Headings of different levels An article with 3 or more headings automatically creates a table of contents.More information about how to use the dokuwiki in op5 Monitor can be found in op5 Monitor Administrator Manual or atop5 Monitor can do a lot on its own. But to get the most out of op5 monitor you should use our agents.The following agents are available from the download section in the support section at www.op5.com/support/downloads.
This is the agent used for monitoring Microsoft Windows operating systems.You can also use the built-in NRPE support to create your own commands for op5 NSClient++ This is the most commonly used agent for Linux and Unix systems. NRPE is used to execute plugins on an remote machine and then send the results back to op5 Monitor.You may also send arguments to the NRPE daemon on the remote machine to make it a bit more flexible. This must be turned on before you use the feature. MRTGEXT was originally written as an NLM for Novel Netware to obtain values used with the widely known MRTG (predecessor of cacti, which is the base of OP5 Statistics), but it can also be used to poll values from op5 Monitor. op5 Syslog Agent runs as a service under Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003. It formats all types of Windows Event log entries into syslog format and sends them to a syslog host (The op5 Monitor server or the op5 LogServer).
This option is set if you want this scheduled downtime depending on an other scheduled downtime.