We now have the Nagios XI wizards built for both the IBM i plugin and a new HMC plugin which is due to be released today. These wizards greatly reduce the effort required to install and configure the plugins when using the Nagios XI product. Any future updates that we will release for the product will also use the wizard technology for update and deployment.
Here are a few screen shots showing just how easy it is to install the HMC wizard and set up the initial configuration. First thing get the wizard (a zip file) from our website down to a location that can be used to upload to your Nagios XI instance. The upload process and install is the same as any other Nagios plugin supplied as a wizard. Open Nagios XI using the admin profile then to go to Admin/Manage Config Wizards page.
Click “Upload and Install” to upload the zip file to the XI instance where it automatically installs all of the required objects into the relevant directory structure. You should see a page similar to below which indicates the wizard was installed. ( If you have any issues with the install you can contact us to help fix any issue found by the installer).
Configuring the HMC is a little different to other installs because the host which is the HMC looks after a number of other hosts and each of these will have monitors attached to them. Go to the Configure/Configuration wizards page, it should look similar to the screen shot below.
Click the “AAG for HMC ” button and you will be presented with the initial configuration screen, this is where we need to add the HMC host information, the HMC must to available at this stage as we will need to connect and extract the information about the LPAR’s etc that the HMC is controlling.
After clicking next you will enter a name for the host and the credentials that will be used to sign on and grab the configuration data. The user must have enough authority to grab the data via the REST API’s provided by IBM (this post assumes you have already set up the HMC to allow the extraction of the data via the REST API’s). You can leave the default for overwriting any existing data in most cases. The SSL encryption is unsupported at this time but will be considered in the future if required.
After pressing next there will be a short delay while the wizard contacts the HMC and pulls back the data required to build a list of LPAR’s etc that can be monitored. This process requires a large amount of XML data be pulled from the HMC via the REST API’s and then filtered to provide the configuration data required. You will be presented with a list of the LPAR’s,VIOS and Managed Systems that were reported back by the HMC that can be used to select which items are to be monitored.
You can leave the defaults and select finish on this screen. Nagios will now configure the check commands and services for all of the items selected, it will also push the new configuration into the monitoring process.
Click the link to go to view the status details for your HMC and you should see a list of all of the checks that are going to be run against the HMC. It will take some time for the checks to be run through the scheduler but eventually everything will be set up and running. You can filter out some of the checks for each host as required plus alter some of the defaults that we set up for the check interval and level of notifications etc..
Here are the monitors that we have provided so far.
Managed System:
State
PhysicalSystemAttentionLEDState
MemoryDefragmentationState
Logical Partition:
IsVirtualServiceAttentionLEDOn
MigrationState
ProgressState
PartitionState
VIOS:
IsVirtualServiceAttentionLEDOn
PartitionState
RMCState
There are still a lot of updates in the pipeline for both the HMC and the IBM i that we hope to be able to write new monitors for, if you have any ideas on what you would like to see monitored via the plugins let us know.
Chris..