How to successfully implement network monitoring
Implementing monitoring can be a very broad concept. This document concretizes what such an implementation consists of, in order to give you an overview of what needs to be done, who to involve and how to prioritize.
Main Goals Copied
If implemented correctly, monitoring can really influence and support how you work, what you spend your time on and how you make decisions. Below are some main goals which are important to keep in mind in order to prioritize wisely how you spend your time when building a monitoring configuration.
a. Get in control of your IT-services Copied
Every IT-service is dependent on a number of network-services, processes, servers, network equipment, and network connections. By monitoring all the dependencies, you gain understanding of how different problems affect your services. Using that information, you can make informed decisions on how to best manage and further develop your operations environment.
b. Work proactively Copied
With correctly configured thresholds, you will get warnings /before/ things stop working. By reacting on warnings, you have already fixed the problem, or are already working on the problem, when users start reporting errors.
By using OLA-reporting (Operational Level Agreement reports) you can fix problems /before/ they start affecting your services. OLA-reports are reports that include all the dependencies of an IT-service.
c. Tie the core business closer to IT-operations Copied
By identifying “system owners” in the organization, you can make colleagues understand the importance of IT-systems. An originator/supplier relationship can be established between the system owners and the monitoring administrators to aid in finding a good routine for adding more monitoring. The work of creating and managing SLA-reports (Service Level Agreement reports) can be delegated to the system owners who can schedule the reports for automatic delivery to managers responsible for service availability.
Planning the deployment Copied
When planning how to deploy monitoring, split the work that lies ahead into three to ten stages and populate each stage with one to three tasks (types of services to add). Plan for a test and adjustment period of at least a week between the end of one stage and the start of the next. The test and adjustment periods are needed to be able to remedy errors in your IT-environment that have been discovered in each stage, and to confirm that thresholds and check periods are correctly configured/adjusted. Use alert summary reports to pinpoint what needs to be remedied or adjusted in each test and adjustment period.
In the planning stage, the good old OSI-model can be of use.
Order of importance Copied
Below is a list of tasks or service-types to add to your configuration, listed in order of importance. How important it is to monitor different service-types is of course specific for each organization, but the list below can be a good starting-point.
In short you start by pinging your servers and finish up by adding monitoring of log filters matching on “bad signs” (early warnings) in your logs.
| Task /service-type | Description | Applicable OP5 products | Commonly used plugins |
|---|---|---|---|
| hosts | Check host availability and graph ICMP ping statistics | op5 Monitor | check_host, check_icmp |
| environmentals | Monitor and graph temperature, humidity, and floor wetness | op5 Monitor | check_tempraxe, check_em1, |
| ups | Monitor and graph status, load per phase and estimated battery runtime | op5 Monitor | check_snmp, check_apc, check_ups |
| network services basic | Check availability of network services like dns, imap, http, smtp and graph their response time | op5 Monitor | check_tcp, check_dig, check_http, check_imap |
| agent services | Monitor and graph OS resource utilization (disk, cpu, memory, swap, processes, connections, cache) | op5 Monitor | check_nt, check_nrpe, check_nwstat |
| services, daemons, processes and jobs | Monitor Windows services and processes, unix/linux daemons, processes and OS400 subsystems and jobs | op5 Monitor | check_nt, check_nrpe, check_as400 |
| network services advanced | Advanced monitoring of network services, like advanced database-or website-monitoring | op5 Monitor | check_mysql, check_sql, check_oracle, check_webinject, check_http |
| graphs for traffic/errors | Monitor and graph traffic (bandwidth usage) and errors/discards on relevant NICs/ports on switches/routers. Locate and remedy sources of broken packets. | op5 Monitor | check_traffic, check_iferrors, check_snmpif |
| hardware services | Check hardware status (disk-arrays, temperature, power-supplies, fans, memory modules) | op5 Monitor | check_openmanage, check_hpasm, check_snmp, check_snmp_env, check_ipmi_sensor |
| logs | Collect/centralize and archive Eventlogs/syslogs and application-logs. Monitor for bad messages. | op5 Monitor + LogServer extension | check_ls_log, check_log2 |