VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

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falawlen
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VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by falawlen »

I found something really strange.. I have Nagios setup to Ping every 5 mins and then if it doesn't respond to try again every min for 4 times. With this setting, it would cause issues with the voice quality on the SIP Phone System. When I would # out the host name to disable it temp, it would then stop effecting the phones.

Does anyone have any thoughts why this would be happening? I've never heard of a ping causing voice quality issues. I can post config settings if needed.

Edit:
Server = GoDaddy VPS Non Managed Server
OS = CentOS 6
RAM = 1 GB
Disk = 40 GB

ownCloud is installed on the same server
Last edited by falawlen on Thu Oct 19, 2017 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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eloyd
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by eloyd »

So, without knowing anything else about your system, I'm inclined to think that your settings are not actually every 5 minutes and that your pings are essentially DoS attacks.

Can we see your configuration file that shows the settings for this service?
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falawlen
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by falawlen »

Thank you for your reply. Please see below for the config files. Let me know if I'm overlooking anything. Its a good possibility that it is configured wrong and is pinging every second like a DDoS attack.

commands.cfg

Code: Select all

# 'check_ping' command definition
define command{
        command_name    check_ping
        command_line    $USER1$/check_ping -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ -p 5
        }
host and service

Code: Select all

define host {
        use     generic-switch
        host_name       blankforthispost
        alias           blank
        address         xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
        hostgroups      managed
}

define service{
        use                     generic-service
        host_name               blankforthispost
        service_description     PING
        check_command           check_ping!600.0,20%!600.0,60%
        normal_check_interval   5
        retry_check_interval    1
        }
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eloyd
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by eloyd »

Can you do this and post the output:

Code: Select all

[root@nagios ~]# grep interval_length /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg
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falawlen
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by falawlen »

Sure

grep interval_length /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg

Code: Select all

interval_length=60
dwhitfield
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by dwhitfield »

How many hosts do you have? Are they all going down (according to Core) at the same time? Are you sending your nagios logs to a central log server or nagios data anywhere over the network?
falawlen
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by falawlen »

dwhitfield wrote:How many hosts do you have? Are they all going down (according to Core) at the same time? Are you sending your nagios logs to a central log server or nagios data anywhere over the network?
(1) Roughly 350ish hosts. I have disabled all of them temporarily. I only saw 2 instances that were brought to my attention that were having the issues.
(2) No, they are not all going down. They don't even show any issues. The only way I know is that the business will call and inform me that the voice quality is poor. (Its not the PBX, switch config, ISP, or QOS. That side of things im 101% confident on.)
(3) No, any and all logs will be on the same server locally.

SIDE NOTE! = I did fail to mention that I do have ownCloud installed on the same server.
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tacolover101
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by tacolover101 »

falawlen wrote:
dwhitfield wrote:How many hosts do you have? Are they all going down (according to Core) at the same time? Are you sending your nagios logs to a central log server or nagios data anywhere over the network?
(1) Roughly 350ish hosts. I have disabled all of them temporarily. I only saw 2 instances that were brought to my attention that were having the issues.
(2) No, they are not all going down. They don't even show any issues. The only way I know is that the business will call and inform me that the voice quality is poor. (Its not the PBX, switch config, ISP, or QOS. That side of things im 101% confident on.)
(3) No, any and all logs will be on the same server locally.

SIDE NOTE! = I did fail to mention that I do have ownCloud installed on the same server.
are these the specs for your PBX server, or the nagios server?

i think the size of your nagios server is irrelevant here.

when you ping the VoIP server manually (get creative, open multiple sessions at a time to replicate what nagios is doing) from the nagios server, are you able to reproduce this? if ping is the cause, then you may want to limit your checks to perhaps ping once. (rather than the default 5)
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eloyd
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by eloyd »

As the sister company of a hosted VoiP provider, we're monitoring dozens of VoIP-related boxes that live directly on the Internet. We've never had pings from Nagios cause voice quality issues. I strongly suggest that something is going on that's causing your network to get flooded when you're doing these requests.

Do you have any packet capture capabilities to look at packet counts when you're doing pings?
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dwhitfield
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Re: VoIP / SIP Voice Issues with Nagios

Post by dwhitfield »

tacolover101 wrote: i think the size of your nagios server is irrelevant here.
At the time, the info about it being a VPS was not posted. I was thinking maybe the entire network was having issues. I mostly agree with the above at this point, though I am still curious about how the PBX network is setup. Like, are all the phones on the same network?

It seems to me the real issue is why is the phone system not responding? The network may have high non-nagios related traffic at those times.

Are you monitoring bandwidth on the Nagios server? That could tell us if it's something coming from the server, whether ping or not.
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