Monitor multiple remote hosts at customer sites (?)

[olezhi]

Hello,

We are looking for solution which allows us to monitor multiple hosts at our customers' sites around the world. I am wondering if Nagios can do that. Reading documentation and this forum has not brought full clarification.

Our situation is as follows:

- central monitoring/reporting server residing in our office.
- hundreds (prospectively - thousands) Mac OS based boxes installed around the world on customers territory. Each host will have unrestricted access to the internet.
- we have no authority over customer's network. No firewall rules, port forwarding, etc. We will have remote access only to our hosts installed in customer's LAN.
- we need at least a simple monitoring solution, alerting us about the remote host UP/DOWN status and generating statistic reports.

I guess, since the central monitoring server cannot access remote networks, it should be some kind of agent software installed on host boxes, which sends periodical heartbeats to the central monitoring server. If it stops the central server will consider this host is down. Similar technology is used, for example, by LogMeIn remote assistance system when the central console shows if remote machines are available or not.

Is there any way to achieve such functionality with Nagios system?

Thank you for your advices.

[slansing]

Welcome Oleze! Yes this can all be accomplished by Nagios XI. There is a OSX agent which can perform a variety of checks on OSX based systems and report back to a central Nagios server. If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us at [email protected], and at

U.S.: 1-888-NAGIOS-1 (1-888-624-4671)
International: +1-651-204-9102

[olezhi]

Thank you for your reply.

I installed the MacOSX agent on one of our hosts. But the Administrator guide and Mac OS/X Monitoring Wizard dictate to point out the IP-address of the monitored host to add it to Nagios monitoring server. As I mentioned it cannot be done since the monitored host is supposed to be in customer's LAN with an unpredictable IP which is not published to the internet.
As far as I understand, the agent software installed on the host should in some way contact Nagios server and announce itself. I cannot find any information how it can be accomplished.

Please advise.

Thank you.

[lmiltchev]

It seems like the only option for you would be to use passive checks. You can probably set up cron jobs, run checks on the hosts machines and then send the results to the Nagios server. You can read more about passive checks here:

http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... ith_XI.pdf

You can also look at NRDS (Nagios Remote Data Sender). It is still a beta, but it may be an option for you.

http://library.nagios.com/library/produ ... -with-nrds

http://library.nagios.com/library/produ ... s-tutorial

Hope this helps.

[olezhi]

Thank you. I will try this.