Monitoring PCs and Servers - Advice?

[tooflyitguy]

Hi All,

I'm starting a new job with, for once, way more PCs than servers. I'd like to monitor the PCs with Nagios as well as the servers, but I'd like the PCs to show up as "unreachable" when turned off, and the services I monitor on the PCs (only CPU, RAM utilization, Disk Space and event logs) to be unavailable as well when the host is unavailable.

Is this possible, without changing the default way that servers are handled?

Thanks for your help,

Mike

[tonyyarusso]

I think what you'd want to do is create a dummy level of things, such that the PCs are "children" of themselves. The upper one would just be a ping check, and then all of the real stuff would go on the lower one.

[tooflyitguy]

Thanks for your reply. What do you mean by "create a dummy level of things" ? Can I accomplish this with a template?

We have about 250 PCs spread across 11 offices.

Thanks!

Mike

[tooflyitguy]

Tony,

Nevermind my last reply - I understand now. Create a set of entries for the PCs, with no services attached, using Ping Test as the default Host check. Then I could create a second entry for each PC and set each one to define the one above as its Parent.

My next question - we allow the users to shut down their PC - is there a way to configure the Ping Test used by the "First Level" to return unreachable if the computer is down? We don't care if they are down at this time, we only want to monitor services if they are up.

Thanks

Mike

[tonyyarusso]

No, as "unreachable" is not one of the four states that a check can return. What will happen is that when the upper host is down, the lower ones will appear as unreachable.