AIX - Monitoring using Nagios XI

[eswaran]

Hello Guys,

I am in the process of decision making in purchasing Nagios XI for monitoring our Infrastructure.
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I would like to setup AIX Monitoring using Nagios XI.
I could not see any AIX monitoring setup wizard in Nagios XI.
Can you please provide me step by step document for configuring Monitoring for AIX 6.1 using Nagios XI.

I am new to Nagios, so please help me to proceed further.

Thank you,
Eswaran

[jdalrymple]

Hi eswaran,

I personally have a strong background in monitoring AIX with Nagios. It is not as straightforward as monitoring Linux using NagiosXI, but it is not in any way difficult.

Here is our document on the subject matter.

The base plugins for checking disk/load/swap etc all compile and run on AIX natively, as does the agent which talks to Nagios. We do offer precompiled binaries for some platforms, but where available I definitely suggest you compile your own. The only requirements are OpenSSL and gcc.

Once you've got the agent (NRPE) and the plugins installed you can run the same wizard you would for monitoring a Linux server to configure your checks. Alternatively (and preferably in my mind) you can customize the host and service checks to your specific needs by creating them from scratch. This is still a GUI driven process, it just offers more flexibility during creation than the wizard process.

Beyond the native plugins there are also dozens of custom plugins out on the Exchange and additionally it's trivial to write your own plugins. I wrote plugins in minutes for AIX boxes that our Tivoli monitoring administrators could never replicate no matter how hard he tried.

Let us know if this doesn't answer all of your questions.

[eswaran]

Hello,
Thank you for the quick answer.
After struggling a lot, I managed to start NRPE in AIX.

Now after I ran the configuration wizard, I get the below Error message for most of the Services.
(Return code of 255 is out of bounds)

1. Just I want to know how to resolve this problem?
2. Is there any Troubleshooting guide which contains all the common problems and solution including my above issue?
3. If there is a problem are there some logs where I can open and check the error message and solve the issues?

I have a long way to go for this POC, First I need to test with AIX, then DB2, Exchange Server, SAP etc.
Then I go for the Purchase decision!!

Thank you in advance for your support Guys.

Regards,
Eswaran

[eswaran]

This is very very hard to configure simple AIX monitoring in Nagios.
Why cant it be just like this.
1. Install an Agent in client side.
2. Configure monitoring in Server side.

I have to learn a complete new technology just for setting up monitoring and you know actually it is very very difficult for me to understand why it fails.
I am still not able to find the reason why just AIX configuration is not working.

Any of you guys have the screenshots of nrpe.cfg file and corresponding nrpe configuration wizard.
This will make people's life easier.

Thank you,

Regards,
Eswaran

[jdalrymple]

There error code 255 is out of bounds generally means you don't have plugins installed.

Do you? You're looking for the binaries check_disk, check_swap, check_load, etc. The path should match what you have in your nrpe.cfg. If you'd like I can send you screenshots of my nrpe.cfg, but it's unedited. It looks exactly like yours did when you first installed nrpe. You only need to change it if you go to extend the base capabilities.

You've probably seen this: http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... g_NRPE.pdf
Generally speaking if you're going past the NRPE wizards and manually modifying nrpe.cfg the file is self documenting.

On the server you must have the nrpe agent (sounds like you've got that going OK) then you also need the plugins for it to run.

I'm sorry to hear your frustration. I'm confident that once you understand how the pieces go together you'll find it's actually quite simple and elegant. A lot of monitoring tools (like IBM's own) use a static agent and are mostly unable to be extended. The agent you installed only communicates with the monitoring server so that you can then use plugins to extend the configuration in any way you can imagine.

[mendell]

I uploaded a sample NRPE.CFG file from a working AIX client. Modify the allowed hosts and customize the checks.

nrpe.cfg

Kyle

[eswaran]

Thanks for the answer.

I have modified my nrpe.cfg file as per the attached nrpe.cfg file and customized according to my need.
Can you please let me know how to configure now in NRPE Wizard?
I just want to know whether any arguments I need to pass when configuring my host using NRPE config wizard?
or just I can hard code the arguments in nrpe.cfg file and run NRPE wizard without any arguments?

Thank you.

Regards,
Eswaran

[jdalrymple]

I think you're getting a good handle on things.

You can go either route - whichever you prefer. If you pass the arguments it gives you more flexibility at the Nagios end if you have many hosts configured differently, but it does add a bit of complexity and involves a slight security risk.

If you hard code them in nrpe.cfg it greatly simplifies the Nagios configuration end and makes troubleshooting any weird issues easier usually.

note that the attached nrpe.cfg allows arguments to be passed. If you want to tighten up the security a bit you could change dont_blame_nrpe to 0.