Charles Hathaway via plug on 15 Aug 2021 17:57:42 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Small scale Icinga1 replacement?


Hey JP,

I've been playing with Prometheus, specifically prometheus-node to expose host data, along with Grafana as a nice UI.

It is pretty light weight (I run it on a bunch of raspberry pi's), but very different than Nagios. The way I've used it is having it poll my servers (so it connects to them and scrapes /health or something), but it looks like it might also support a 'push gateway'.

The core of it is in Debian repos (core, node), but Grafana looks like it has it's own deb repo.

It took me less than 6 hours for 6 nodes, but more than 3. A large part of that was initial setup and learning, then I got to get pretty good at adding nodes of various bits (including adding tooling to my own software).

Prometheus is the backend database, along with the 'controller' which scrapes the nodes for data.

Not written in java (mostly Go, I think).

Don't know about NRPE; but I think prometheus-node is an agent though, from your perspective?

Config is text file based.

Charles

On 8/15/21 1:15 PM, JP Vossen via plug wrote:
When I had to switch my home monitoring away from Nagios circa 2018, it was very painful and I ended up just going from Nagios3 to more-or-less-drop-in Icinga1.  But per the Debian Buster release, that (stone-age) Icinga1 is gone.  Icinga2 is there, but if I have to start from scratch, what's better, or at least sucks less?

Requirements:
* In the Debian 11 repos, and ideally in the 10 repos too
* <4-6 hour setup from scratch for ~40 objects, mostly Linux, but some BSD, ESXi, networking stuff, ATA, HD Homerun tuner, printers, etc.
* The install will be on a shared services server, not dedicated, so it needs to play nice
* Low resource use (nothing Java!)
** Ideally no back-end DB, like MySQL, required
* Less NRPE agent BS would be nice, I've had a bunch of v2 to v3 compatibility issues and much log spam
* In fact "agentless" would be awesome, if that's a thing
** Because the Icinga2 agent sounded awful last time I checked: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-monitor-hosts-and-services-with-icinga-on-ubuntu-16-04
* Easy deployment via Ansible, if there is an agent
* The usual parent/dependency relationship definition
* Bogus points for a nice GUI map and status board (BOY is Icinga1 ugly here!)
* I'm torn about CLI/flat text vs. GUI config: I usually prefer CLI/text, but this is mostly a one-time-only and I recall Nagios/Icinga and Icinga2 having a painful learning curve for the config files

Monitoring:
* Up and running/connectivity
* Disk space
* CPU load
* Various servers running well, like DNS, HTTP/S, MythTV, sshd, etc.

I probably won't get around to this for a few months, though if there's a better tool in both Debian 10 and 11 repos maybe I'll pre-migrate monitoring before I move to Buster.

Thanks for any clues,
JP
--  -------------------------------------------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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Charles Hathaway, PhD
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