Nagios Distributed with collectors in multiple sites

[skulcsar]

Hi!

I'm quite new in Nagios, but I have a task for creating a Nagios distributed monitoring over a VPN connection to another site.
My idea is to get installed some "collector" on the remote site, which can check nodes there, and forward the results to our Nagios over the VPN connection. The remote site is quite complex, so that's why it's worh installing the collector on the remote site.

First I thought NSCA would do the job, but as I understood NSCA client needed to be installed on each monitored host. But we would monitor network devices, where I cannot install NSCA client.
How is it possible to have a collector at the site, which checks the network devices via SNMP, and forwards the results?

My another option is to install Nagios Core on the remote site, and set up forwarding to our central Nagios.

What are your experiences, which would be a good solution?
Any idea would be welcomed!

Thank you very much!

[dwhitfield]

First off, welcome!

Since you are new, I am going to point you to some general information first and if you need more detail we can work from this base.

First off, you should take a look at https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/gen ... utions.pdf. Strictly speaking, most of this is not going to be what you want, but I think it will be a good introduction to some things you can do planning for future growth.

We do not maintain http://nagios.manubulon.com/traduction/ ... buted.html, but techs have used it in the past and I've not seen issues.

I don't know if the VPN is something that is a requirement or something you set up specifically for nagios security, but you might like at SNMPv3 and check_by_ssh for security issues.

Generally speaking, the more information (configs, logs, errors) you can give us, the better. You can always scrub or PM as necessary for security concerns.

[skulcsar]

Hi!

Thank you for your useful response!
I started along with your links, and I also continue to browse earlier topics of this forum.
I already found some quite useful tips, which is enough now for me to start on from this topics:
https://support.nagios.com/forum/viewto ... =7&t=39183

Our aim is that we will have a customer off-site, and we are connecting to their environment via VPN. We are asked to monitor their firewall devices health, which are around 40 Fortigate devices. This is a first step, and we will have more customers like this one, we want to build a central Nagios monitor server, and collect all customer events/alerts to this central one, and handle them here.

I will try out to understand how could NRPE check the Fortigate health, and get their statuses forwared to our central Nagios. (It's still under discussion if we will have Nagios XI or Core, I would prefer the XI )

[dwhitfield]

It's still under discussion if we will have Nagios XI or Core, I would prefer the XI

These are not mutually exclusive. We have at least one customer using both and I'd be exceedingly shocked if we didn't have more. I wasn't able to find any good documentation on the topic from our sites, but obviously we can leave this open for community feedback and maybe someone will chime in with how both is working for them.

Have you used your one-hour quickstart? There's no obligation and it might be useful for showing management the power of XI: https://www.nagios.com/services/quickstart/

So, as for the topic at hand, was there anything still specific on the VPN you needed help with? Certainly something like the Fortigate is something you could talk about in the quickstart.