Compatible with NMIS9

Tabled of Contents

Introduction

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Depends on NET-SNMP daemon being installed and configured, usually installed by default on most Unix platforms.  Instructions for installing the NET-SNMP daemon are included in the NMIS 8 Installation Guide (up to Version 8.5.4G).

Configuring NMIS to Monitor Services

An updated services file "Services.nmis" was distributed with later NMIS8 versions, and is attached to this page Services.nmis, this is compatible with earlier versions of NMIS8.  This file includes definitions for using the script method to poll HTTP, as well as monitoring for a MySQL daemon, and various ports using NMAP connections.  Once Services.nmis is copied to /usr/local/nmis8/conf, you should verify that you have the scripts folder in nmis8, this is included in the install directory. Running cp -r /usr/local/nmis8/install/scripts /usr/local/nmis8/conf will ensure the service definition files are available.

When a service "outage" is detected you will receive NMIS events and notifications if NMIS has been configured to do so.

Step 1

From the NMIS Menu, navigate to "System -> System Configuration -> Nodes (devices)"

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Step 2

From the list of nodes, select "edit" from the server you want to monitor services on.

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Step 3

From the services box, select the services you want to monitor, you can select several services.

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Step 4

When you are done, select "Edit and Update Node", after the next poll cycle runs, within about 5 minutes you will see that the services are now being monitored

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Step 5

You can also now select "Services" from the node menu bar and see a graph of all the monitored services.

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Starting with version 8.4.10G the service graphs also include the response time (as number and and graph) which is the elapsed time of the service test.

Defining new SNMP based Services to Monitor

This is how to define a new services based on using SNMP for the status of the service.

Step 1

Determine the name of the service process you want to monitor, for example to Monitor MongoDB on Windows, the process name is mongod.exe. As the MongoDB server state is reported as an attribute for the named process, you'll have to tell NMIS what process to look for.

Step 2

From the NMIS Menu, navigate to "System -> System Configuration -> Services"

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Step 3

Then select add or edit to add a new service or edit an existing service monitoring definition.

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Step 4

Give the service a (display) name, for Windows we call them service and for Unix we call them daemons. Insert the appropriate process name in the Service Name field, and select the Service Type service to tell NMIS that this is an SNMP-monitored service.

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Step 5

Click "Add" or "Edit" to save the new service and then you can assign this to a device as described above in "Configuring NMIS Services to Monitor"

Quickstart Chart of a Service Definition

Configuring NMIS to Monitor Services - Step By Step

An updated services file "Services.nmis" was distributed with later NMIS8 versions, and is attached to this page Services.nmis, this is compatible with earlier versions of NMIS8.  This file includes definitions for using the script method to poll HTTP, as well as monitoring for a MySQL daemon, and various ports using NMAP connections.  Once Services.nmis is copied to /usr/local/nmis8/conf, you should verify that you have the scripts folder in nmis8, this is included in the install directory. Running cp -r /usr/local/nmis8/install/scripts /usr/local/nmis8/conf will ensure the service definition files are available.

When a service "outage" is detected you will receive NMIS events and notifications if NMIS has been configured to do so.

Step 1

From the NMIS Menu, navigate to "System -> System Configuration -> Nodes (devices)"

Image Added

Step 2

From the list of nodes, select "edit" from the server you want to monitor services on.

Image Added

Step 3

From the services box, select the services you want to monitor, you can select several services.

Image Added

Step 4

When you are done, select "Edit and Update Node", after the next poll cycle runs, within about 5 minutes you will see that the services are now being monitored

Image Added

Step 5

You can also now select "Services" from the node menu bar and see a graph of all the monitored services.

Image Added

Starting with version 8.4.10G the service graphs also include the response time (as number and and graph) which is the elapsed time of the service test.

Defining new SNMP based Services to Monitor

This is how to define a new services based on using SNMP for the status of the service.

This feature requires the device to support the HOST-RESOURCES-MIB, and specifically the hrSWRun instrumentation which provides "The (conceptual) table of software running on the host."

Step 1

Determine the name of the service process you want to monitor, for example to Monitor MongoDB on Windows, the process name is mongod.exe. As the MongoDB server state is reported as an attribute for the named process, you'll have to tell NMIS what process to look for.

Step 2

From the NMIS Menu, navigate to "System -> System Configuration -> Services"

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Step 3

Then select add or edit to add a new service or edit an existing service monitoring definition.

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Step 4

Give the service a (display) name, for Windows we call them service and for Unix we call them daemons. Insert the appropriate process name in the Service Name field, and select the Service Type service to tell NMIS that this is an SNMP-monitored service.

Image Added

Step 5

Click "Add" or "Edit" to save the new service and then you can assign this to a device as described above in "Configuring NMIS Services to Monitor".

Process Selection Details

In NMIS 8.6 we refined the process selection mechanism to improve its flexibility, and you can now check more of the process properties reported by SNMP.
(Up to Version 8.5.12G only Service Name is matched against the Process Name).

• Your given "Service Name" is used  (as regular expression) to check the Process Name,
• and your given "Service Parameters" value is used (again as regular expression) to check the Process Path and Process Arguments.

You have to provide at least one of the two, and a blank value will be interpreted as 'match anything'.

Note that the Service Name regular expression cannot contain the anchors "^" or "$", whereas the Service Parameters one can.

For example, if you want to check a particular Java application, you would set the Service Name to java and the Service Parameters to some identifying property for this particular application. To figure out what exactly might distinguish this application from others, have a look at the Service List page for that node, and the Service and Parameters columns in particular:

In this example, the Java process happens to be the one for the Confluence application, and the mingetty is the one covering the second terminal.

The following simple configuration would match just those two processes:

  'confluence' => {
    'Name' => 'confluence',
    'Service_Type' => 'service',
    'Poll_Interval' => '5m',
    'Service_Name' => 'java',
    'Service_Parameters' => '/opt/confluence',
  },
  'secondterminal' => {
    'Name' => 'secondterminal',
    'Service_Type' => 'service',
    'Poll_Interval' => '5m',
    'Service_Name' => '(min|a)getty',
    'Service_Parameters' => 'tty2',
  },

You can also be more specific or loose if needed, as both Service Name and Parameters allow regular expressions: The example above will also accept "agetty" processes serving the second terminal.

Defining new TCP or UDP Ports to Monitor

Assuming you only want to check if a server listens for network connections on a particular TCP or UDP port (without actually exchanging application-level data with that service), then this is how to instruct NMIS to do that:

• Select Service Type port
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• Give the appropriate port and protocol in the form of udp:123 (that would be NTP) or tcp:22 (that's SSH)
• Ignore Service Name and all program-related settings

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• Service Type is dns.
• Up to version 8.4.10G inclusive, the builtin dns monitor requires the node's Name/IP Address setting to hold the node's fully qualified domain name. NMIS then requests DNS info for this FQDN from the node that is marked for dns service monitoring. The Service Name is ignored.
• After version 8.4.10G, you have to specify what is to be looked up must specify the DNS query target as the Service Name. This can be either an IP address or a fully qualified domain name (host or domain). Again it is the node marked for dns monitoring that is asked for DNS info, but you've got control over what is requested.

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Determine the name of the service you want to monitor, for example to is the NMIS web application running.

In the example below we call the service "nmis" and we check that the NMIS web application is running and answering.

Note that the script file must be named the same as the Name given to the service.

Step 2 and Step 3

Same as above, 

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Then select add or edit to add a new service or edit an existing service monitoring definition. 

cp /usr/local/nmis8/conf/scripts/http /usr/local/nmis8/conf/scripts/nmis

send: HEAD /nmis8/ HTTP/1.0
send: 
expect: 200 OK

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 05:19:19 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
Last-Modified: Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:14:21 GMT
ETag: "a233b-67c-4d8686950cd27"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1660
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

    'nmis_executable' => '(/(bin|admin)/[a-zA-Z0-9_\\.-]+|\\.pl|\\.sh)$',