How to install Nagios XI given clean system disclaimer

[relops57]

Hello

We have a server RH host with the following 'assests' (server)

1). Twiki
2). License Server (flexlm)
3). Company product server

which we would

1). Like to monitor
2). Not impact (i.e. limited disaster recovery)

According to your disclaimer

Installation Prerequisites Important: Nagios Enterprises highly recommends and will only support installing Nagios XI on a newly installed, "clean" system (a bare minimal install with nothing else installed or configured). Attempting to install Nagios XI on a pre-existing system with other applications already installed can cause the Nagios XI installation process to fail, critical system components and settings (e.g. database servers) to be modified in a way that negatively affects other applications, and previously installed applications to be automatically upgraded or removed. While installing XI on a system with other applications is possible, Installing Nagios XI Manually on Linux not recommended due to the possible interactions and complexity of multiple components that are required for Nagios XI to function. If you choose to ignore these warnings, you do so at your own risk. Other Nagios products (Network Analyzer, Log Server and Fusion) should not co-exist on the same server. Nagios XI hardware requirements can be found in the following documentation: Nagios XI Hardware Requirements Internet access is required for installation and upgrades!

So ok a clean system. How does that work wrt monitoring this host with our server assests? Do we somehow link to it from this clean server? Some other options? Something about the paradigm I am missing to Nagios? FYI: We have installed Nagios on other host, so the process is familiar to us, but we do not have any actual user experience

TIA

[mcapra]

How does that work wrt monitoring this host with our server assests? Do we somehow link to it from this clean server? Some other options? Something about the paradigm I am missing to Nagios?

You don't typically install Nagios XI on-top of "the thing" you want to monitor. You would (typically) install an agent (net-snmp, NCPA, NRPE, there's a bunch) on the machine you want to monitor, then tell your Nagios XI machine to reach out to that agent to perform some sort of "check in".

In some cases, installing a specific agent is not required. In the case of Windows, you could leverage an existing built-in platform like WMI by using the WMI configuration wizard.

You install Nagios on it's own machine, then either by the power of passive checks or active checks can begin collecting information about your infrastructure.

There's an awful lot of ground to cover when discussing monitoring broadly, but the basic idea in most cases is that you have some sort of machine or group of machines that exist for the sole purpose of collecting information about the state your infrastructure. Those machines can often make decisions (like paging your on-call staff) depending on the specific state of your infrastructure. Single kubelet down in a pool of 700? No biggie; it can wait until tomorrow. Only satisfying 30% of your requests with an SLA of 99%? Maybe call the fire brigade.

[cdienger]

Thanks for the input, @mcapra!

[relops57]

OK

So after two very difficult days of installing on a clean CentOS 6.7 OS, the Nagios XI is up and running. I have been able (again with some serious manual actions of yum updates and struggling with NRPE) to get server to client access. And now I have data to show for this (10 hosts). So now my questions moving forward.

NRPE on Linux Version 3.2.0 vs 3.2.1 (aka the agent) seems to behave differently. Case in point: check_mem with 3.2.0 returns unable to read output 3.2.1 host returns OK. This is my analysis (NRPE difference). Any suggestions to remedy (both are CentOS 6.7 clients)

Windows Client 'agents' for Nagios XI monitoring

Too many choices (3 I believe) to provide this link to NRPE. Can you recommend to us which to choose?

Licensing:

OK. First attempt of Nagios install was asking me to useradd 'people'. My boss advised me that this is a 'full blown version' of the install and to avoid this. Second attempt was Nagios XI which I downloaded according to

cd /tmp
wget https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... est.tar.gz
tar xzf xi-latest.tar.gz
cd nagiosxi/
./fullinstall

And this produced a version install of 5.3.3 with a 60 day license.

License question: While I have no details of one of our company site's experience with a similar installation, I have been informed that they have a working install (XI) with no license countdown. So my question:

Is there a 'no license version' (free) install I should consider or plan B:

Can we extend this period? Our schedule and budget puts us in the early March 2019 timeframe to make this purchase. So any mechanism to keep the existing based on this info would be appreciated.

Thanks

[lmiltchev]

Is there a 'no license version' (free) install I should consider or plan B:

Yes, with the "Free" version of Nagios XI, you could monitor up to 7 nodes. To switch to a free license, go to Admin > System Config > License Information, select "License Type = Free", and click on Update License.

Can we extend this period? Our schedule and budget puts us in the early March 2019 timeframe to make this purchase. So any mechanism to keep the existing based on this info would be appreciated.

Contact our sales team at [email protected]. They can help you out, and provide you with an extension.