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Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 5:21 am
by SDohmen
Hello,

For some of ours customers we need to monitor there workstations which are using dhcp. I was wondering how i can monitor these best. On the nagios machine i tried using the dns as address but this did not work at all.

Does anyone have a solution for this? Setting the workstations to static ip's is not a option.

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 10:10 am
by lmiltchev
If setting the workstations to static IPs is not an option, then you will have to use passive checks. You can read more on the topic here:

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

Hope this helps!

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 11:24 am
by SDohmen
I was hoping that there is a option where i can still use active checks because of the distributed monitoring solution we use already with passive checks.

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 11:44 am
by mguthrie
The only way for the active check to work is with a valid DNS name or IP address. You said that DNS didn't work, did you update the /etc/hosts file on your Nagios XI server to reflect the local DNS entries?

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:37 am
by SDohmen
I am not 100% sure what you mean but i can ping my dns just fine. Except when i added it in the nagios core (its a slave for the xi central) i dont even see it showing up in the host list on that site itself.

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:57 am
by agriffin
Is it a possibility to assign each of these workstations a dynamic DNS name?

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2011 3:21 pm
by SDohmen
It would be possible to create dns rules for each but seeing as some of our customers have over 50 workstations, i am pretty sure my co-workers will hate me if i ask them that :D

I guess the only option is to check out NSCA even though i would prefer active checks.

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2011 9:39 am
by mguthrie
Yeah, I think passive checks are going to be the most practical option here. Take a look at the following docs, particularly the one on Unconfigured Objects, it should make the setup fairly straightforward.
http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... sivechecks

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 1:02 am
by SDohmen
The problem is i cant use nagios xi to monitor the customers since its our central. We use a distributed monitoring system in which the older core version runs at the customer location.

What i am wondering however is why the documentation says i can monitor on fqdn (and ip) but when i try that on my own machine it doesn't show up on the local core version where its added. Is there something special needed to get this to work or is this only able to work with the xi version?

Re: Monitor DHCP workstations

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 9:36 am
by mguthrie
Take a look at the Core docs for setting up passive checks with Core:
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/ ... hecks.html

Something you could do for these checks on the local Core servers is define an OCSP command that forwards the results to the central server each time they're received. Take a look at the doc below for the full description:
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html