IPSec Tunnel Monitoring

[rj-admin2]

We currently have 3 sites with IPSec (site-to-site VPN) tunnels active between them. I'm looking into monitoring the tunnels to make sure they are constantly up and operational. From a Nagios XI standpoint, how do I go about that and how would this monitoring factor into parent-child relationships within Nagios XI?

TIA.

[sgardil]

We currently have 3 sites with IPSec (site-to-site VPN) tunnels active between them. I'm looking into monitoring the tunnels to make sure they are constantly up and operational. From a Nagios XI standpoint, how do I go about that and how would this monitoring factor into parent-child relationships within Nagios XI?

TIA.

Hey @rj-admin2


If you want to be fairly in-depth then you may need to write your own plugin. I'll attach a link to our guidelines for writing a custom plugin if you want to look into that. Off the top of my head you could monitor the ping of the VPN gateways or perhaps the firewall of your network thats connecting to the VPN. Though idk if that would be enough to properly monitor your IPSec tunnels. As for the parent-child relationships that would depend on how and if you want to set up parent-child relationships. If you can properly monitor it then it could be good to set up parent-child relationships for your tunnels to make sure you are getting correct alerts. For example if you set up a tunnel or the gateway as a parent and that goes down, instead of receiving a bunch of alerts on services being down from that tunnel, you should receive an alert notifying you that the tunnel is down.

https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html

[kg2857]

Step one is asking yourself how do you check from the shell. Then look into shell/perl/python scripting, or go to the echchange and see how others have done the same.

[jmichaelson]

And before you get to KG2857's suggestion (which is a really good starting point), and for the community to help in general, what platform are your tunnels on? e.g., Cicso routers, Linux systems, etc.