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Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 6:50 am
by klee
Is there a wizard or plugin for NagiosXI that's able to monitor Microsoft Distributed File Systems?

Thanks,

-klee

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 12:10 pm
by lmiltchev
The only entry, mentioning DFS I found on the Nagios Exchage was this one:

http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Ad ... or/details

You could write your own custom plugin, following the Nagios plugins development guidelines:

https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html

or you can contact our sales team at [email protected] and request a quote for a custom development.

Hope this helps.

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2014 12:19 pm
by klee
Thanks lmiltchev, I found this one also.

Unfortunately, it's not provided by nor officially supported by Nagios.

Also, it was written for v3.x not NagiosXI. I would rather use a package that works straight out of the box, as much as possible.

Are any of the agent based Windows monitors capable of monitoring DFS?

Thanks Again,

-klee

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2014 12:31 pm
by tmcdonald
klee wrote: Unfortunately, it's not provided by nor officially supported by Nagios.

Also, it was written for v3.x not NagiosXI. I would rather use a package that works straight out of the box, as much as possible.
While it's true that it wasn't made by Nagios, we still try and support plugins on our Exchange as much as we can.

And plugins are not written for XI, they are written for Core. When you see 3.X, 4.X, etc that is the Nagios Core version. Nagios XI runs on top of and relies on Nagios Core to function. So any Nagios plugin will work in Core or XI. As for the version, there really isn't much difference (if any) between 3.X and 4.0 in terms of writing plugins.

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2014 4:45 pm
by klee
Thanks tmcdonald, I'll have to investigate that 3rd party plugin further.

Meanwhile, we're using Windows WMI wizard to monitor 2 services: DFS Namespace and DFS Replication.

I added DFS and DFSR in the a SERVICES fields (along with their respective DISPLAY NAMES) for "specifying any services that should be monitored to ensure they're in a running state."

After initiating multiple checks, both DFS Namespace and DFS Replication returned the following error.

"UNKNOWN - The WMI query had problems. The target host (192.x.x.x) might not have the required WMI classes installed. This can happen, for example, if you are trying to checkiis but IIS is not installed. It can also happen if your version of Windows do."

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what required WMI classes this message is referring to. Can you please advise?

Thanks,

-klee

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 11:43 am
by sreinhardt
What steps have you followed to implement user permissions for wmi on that system? While base things such as CPU, memory and disk checks will work fine. It is extremely common that services, depending on your environment will not work as freely with WMI. The easiest solution is to add your user account as a local admin of the system, alternatively you can work through a long list of various places to change wmi and dcom permissions for a more restrictive user.

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 8:30 am
by klee
Following instructions from Nagios documentation http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... ng_WMI.pdf

We created a service account, which was added as member of network groups: Distributed Com Users, Performance Log Users, Performance Monitor Users.

Then Remote Activation Privileges to Windows DCOM and Remote WMI Access were added for service account on the client machines

We will not be adding the service account to local admin group.

Can you please provide us with the instructions to monitor DFS with WMI?

Thanks,

-klee

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 2:11 pm
by tmcdonald
Are you able to monitor anything else via WMI? If so this might be a Windows configuration problem.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wik ... -them.aspx

That link goes over WMI and classes in regards to monitoring things via WMI. According to your error it looks like WMI is missing some classes required for DFS monitoring.

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 3:14 pm
by klee
Thanks tmcdonald,

Yes, we've been testing WMI monitor for a while and it's working fine for the following; just not DFS monitoring.

CPU Usage
Drive C: Disk Usage
Memory Usage
Page File Usage
Ping

I'll review this documentation. Meanwhile, do you guys know of a better way to monitor DFS?

Thanks,

-klee

Re: Microsoft DFS monitor

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 3:32 pm
by WillemDH
Hello,

I would think the best way is write your own Powershell plugin to monitor DFS. You can find some very useful cmdlets here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 84270.aspx

You will need to investigate https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html

If you want, you can have a look at some of my Powershell plugins on http://outsideit.net or http://github.com/willemdh and see how I'm handling parameters etc.

Grtz

Willem