There has been a lot going on with the Nagios monitoring solution over the past few months so I thought it was time to update everyone.
IBM stops support.
IBM has sunset support for their “nagios-for-i” plugin as of December 2024 with a recommendation that you look at one of the eco system offerings for monitoring the IBM i.
While there are 2 options at this point I would like to point out a couple of things that make us stand out from the crowd with our Nagios solutions.
- While our plugin will work with any Nagios Core based solution, it is primarily aimed at Nagios XI.
- We provide Nagios XI wizards for installation of all of the plugins.
- Lots of new monitors are added each time we provide updates.
- Everything is configured on the Web Interface provided via Linux, no need to cut and paste from the IBM i (5250) to the Web Interface provided by Nagios.
- Support for IBM i, HMC and now VIOS so you have a plugin to support all of your Power based infrastructure.
- We have developed our own Nagios Core based solution which is open source and provides easy to use interfaces for setting up your monitoring requirements. Its free and can be supported using the open source or via our support services.
- Speed and performance is important, when we looked at the performance of our monitors we saw significant improvements over those provided by the IBM offering, this continues to be a focus for us.
The IBM offering is still available, but IBM is not committing any more resources in trying to fix up any issues found with the solution as it stands today. That does not mean it is dead, its open source and anyone can still download the source and make use of it as they see fit, so if you feel the need to get involved and maybe support the product outside of IBM, I am sure they would be happy to see that happen.
AAG updates
There are a number of updates that have been added to the AAG solution which have been released over the past few months. Some are just enhancements of existing checks but others address areas not covered so far with the plugins.
A release of AAG which runs on the RPi5.
We have never seen any issues with the RPi4 throughput but knowing it can run on the faster RPi5 is a good thing… With the removal of support for the CENTOS distribution we are also looking at where customers are heading in terms of replacement OS and will look at providing a solution when appropriate.
VIOS support
We were asked at the end of the year to look at the possibility of providing monitors for VIOS, we looked around at who else was providing a plugin for VIOS and did not find many options, so we decided to look at how we can provide something. Our initial offering is a little light at this point but as customers start to use the monitors and come up with requests I am sure we can add a lot more. The HMC checks can provide some data about the VIOS as well but we needed to add something a bit more specific. As with all of the plugins we provide a Wizard for Nagios Xi, the current release of the open source option will be updated once we figure out what people need.
Here is a quick overview of how simple it is to install, the VIOS is installed using the HMC wizard (we felt is was so closely related it did not need its own installer). Go to the wizards screen in Nagios XI.
Now enter the IP address of the VIOS and press next.
Enter the name of the VIOS and the sign on information such as “padmin” and select the VIOS checkbox before pressing next.
Now you will need to set up the check commands, we do provide some defaults but they should be amended to your specific VIOS settings. Press finish.
Nagios XI will auto generate the services for you based on the check commands and parameters, you should see the configuration successfully applied screen if everything was set correctly.
Click on the link to view the status details, you should see all of the services in pending as they are still to be run through the scheduler. As they run through they will update and provide the information about the status for the VIOS.
As we mentioned, this is the first pass at providing a set of VIOS monitors, if you have suggestions about what else needs to be monitored or changes to the existing monitors we will be glad to hear them.
If you wish to see a full demo of the monitoring solution or any of our other products please let us know and we will be happy to schedule a demo at your convenience.
Chris…