Auto-Discovery of Linux Servers / Bulk Host Addition

[wneville]

Hello,

I have been working in a fairly large environment and I am trying to automate the discovery and addition of Linux servers on given subnets. I am familiar with running auto-discovery to identify IP addresses and host names that exist on the subnet. I am looking for a solution that sends auto-discovery results to the Bulk Host Cloning Tool immediately after it runs (or a different solution that configures hosts without any manual effort after an auto-discover job completes). Once we are in production I will not have time to send the auto-discover results to Bulk Cloning Tool manually/one subnet at a time.

We are looking to monitor CPU Usage, Disk Space, Memory, Swap and Ping on these boxes. I understand that auto-discover/nmap will not pick up these services so they need to be added with correct thresholds and check intervals after the fact (and since there are >100 servers on each subnet, I have been investigating the Bulk Cloning Tool). Also, the SSH and HTTP(S) services picked up by auto-discover should not be added to monitoring.

Thank you in advance for your time.

[benjaminsmith]

Hi @wneville,

Thanks for joining the forum and I hope you are enjoying the trial of Nagios XI. Some good questions. For the first case, that's currently not built into the Auto Discovery tool, however, I could submit a feature request either on that or an option to run and configure using the API.

On the second question, if you'd like to run checks on CPU, Disk Space..etc. I would recommend installing the NCPA agent on those systems. It's a cross-platform agent that can be used on both Linux and Window systems.

https://www.nagios.org/ncpa/

Also, there is the option to not add the services using the Buk Cloning Tool, which may work best in this case. One trick. You can assign services to host groups and the members of the host group will inherit the service. So if you use the Bulk Tool and assign the new hosts to the respective group, this is another option to control what services are assigned to which hosts. Check out the ProTip videos below on how to do this.

Master assigning service checks by hostgroup - Pro Tip

Tech Talks with Nagios: FAQ: Best Practices for Managing Config

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any more questions.

Regards,
Benjamin