Monitoring client systems with dynamic (dhcp) addresses

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monathan
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed May 29, 2013 1:19 am

Monitoring client systems with dynamic (dhcp) addresses

Post by monathan »

Is there any information on monitoring systems that obtain their IP addresses by DHCP?
I am trying to find if you can identify them by other means (eg MAC, name or something else)
so if a machine moves arond it is recognised as a single instance.

I am fairly new to network montoring so I might just be searching for the wrong keywords, or
it may not be something that is possible...

Monathan
slansing
Posts: 7698
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2012 4:28 pm
Location: Travelling through time and space...

Re: Monitoring client systems with dynamic (dhcp) addresses

Post by slansing »

Please see the following post:

http://support.nagios.com/knowledgebase ... wdesc=true

We need to mainly look at this section:
you can add anything you want for a host address. You can specify an IP address, MAC address, GPS coordinates, etc. Nagios does not directly interpret a host's address (or addresses), so you can do pretty much anything you want. Nagios simply passes this address to plugins and external commands via the $HOSTADDRESS$ macro. You'll have to make sure that you host check command (and possibly service checks, etc.) can understand the format of your host's address in order to check it though.
That's the big one there, as long as the above is true for your environment you should be fine.
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