How to monitor a POS

[Ladi]

Hello Support,

I want to ask if nagios can monitor POS status if its down or up. Please i need assistance on this.



Till i hear from you.


Regards,
Ladi

[jdalrymple]

No doubt your device is on an IP network and it can be pinged? If so then it can be monitored. Even if not it can probably still be monitored. The key part of the equation is that it's on some sort of an IP network.

[eloyd]

Assuming POS is Point Of Sale system, then the answer is yes. We do this for a major, US-based national retailer. PM me if you want to discuss details.

[jolson]

Ladi,

Please let us know if you have further questions. Thanks!

[Ladi]

Hello Guys,

Thanks for your swift response. That means i can monitor check_http. Please do i need to install client on the POS. Please can you guild me through on what and what to do. We have like to 20 POS that we want to monitor the status and create a report for it too.


Till i hear from you.


Regards,
Ladi

[jdalrymple]

Ladi - if your POS is "hosting" http then you don't need to install any agents. You can use the simple check_http plugin which is part of the default plugins package.

If your POS needs to connect to an http service then you will need an agent on the POS. If the POS is Windows or UNIX/Linux based, agent installation is generally pretty straightforward.

We'd need more information about the POS system and/or the architecture to be able to fully answer the question.

[Ladi]

Hello jdalrymple,

Thanks for your response. Yes, the POS is hosting http, so i can try check_http. Secondly, there is a webservice that all POS are connecting to. POS sends and receives request from it. So anytime you On the POS it should connect to the webservice. So we want to monitor the status of the POS from there. To actually see if its connected or not


Hope you understand me.


Regards,
Ladi

[eloyd]

In this case, with Nagios, you can monitor anything that you can check from a web browser. So if the web service that the POS units are connecting to has a status display of some sort, you can probe it and look for result strings that might tell you what you want to know.

[jdalrymple]

So we want to monitor the status of the POS from there. To actually see if its connected or not

You may be monitoring a logfile. We have a builtin plugin for that. You'd run the plugin from the server with the logfile indicating that the POS has actually connected within the past X minutes or so. Dealing with the "past 5 minutes or so" component of that check can be difficult but it's very doable with Nagios, and in a number of different ways.

Does this make sense?