Sep 28-Oct 2 was reporting week- on Startup successes, customer Nagios projects, tech workshops and of course more Jasper reporting tips.
To start, Peter shed light on our Nagios Voice Alert system recently implemented for the City of Augsburg. Per text to voice on a Starface appliance integrated by a NETWAYS module and managed by NoMa, the system calls and speaks alert details to the user, sending acknowledgements at the press of a button.
Another project was also brought into the limelight with the project of the month. For August, it was a large configuration restructure with template integration for a Nagios project at Schüco.
While Karo reported back on the success of the Startup Weekend we supported, Bernd continued his reporting series with two Jasper how-tos. One on displaying current host status with a red/green icon, and another on linking in Jasper charts and content.
To top off the week, Bernd also reported on the important issues of our internal autumn tech workshop– from developments in NETWAYSGrapherV2, voice alert systems and LConf to check_interface_table and Open Source ESB in distributed environments. After such an agenda, we hope our techies came out loaded with new ideas to take on the upcoming projects.
NETWAYS Blog
Project of the month: Nagios templates for configuration clarity
September 2009: When Schüco approached NETWAYS, they had a basic, sluggish Nagios installation they wanted to expand and optimise. With over 46 locations around the globe and 650 devices to monitor, Schüco was looking for support in the coming configuration chaos. Inadvertently, config details were replicated many times over, sitting in large unstructured files so that Schüco admins simply had too much information and no overview.
The first task for consultant William was to restructure their config files into a tree and added template functionality. This suited their multiuser admin needs and simplifying their file structure in turn simplified configuration work. Instead of changing a config variable over 40 times, with templates they now only needed to do it twice.
On this new tidy configuration base, he could then expand the monitoring system’s capabilities to include the usual suspects: EventDB, PNP4Nagios, Nagvis, NETWAYSPortal, SMS alerts, business processes and even Jasper reports. As William customised the NETWAYSPortal for Schüco, he enhanced the SLA view to make target SLAs easier to compare with ‘actual availability’. After a good 20 days work on and offsite, their new state of the art monitoring system was up and running at optimum efficiency. Kudos to that.
Enhanced SLA View for easy target vs. actual availability comparison
Weekly snap: Training in Nagios, Reporting in Jasper & Free Streaming in OSMC
August 31 – 4 Sep was a week dominated by reporting and events. Bernd E kicked off his new series on Jasper Reporting and Christian F gave us a few calendar highlights to look out for. On the side we had a look at the project of August – a Configurator for Nagios when there are simply too many servers and checks to do it by hand.
To open his new series, Bernd mused about the growing importance of professional reporting systems, where a spontaneously compiled Excel sheet just doesn’t hit the mark anymore. With a promised 10 posts to follow, he plans to cover everything from the installation of the server component, to the production of reports with dynamic parameters and the automated scheduling and sending of reports. Within the week he popped off his first entry on how to install JasperServer, child’s play as he says.
Christian F announced a few dates worth marking in the calendar for Nagios enthusiasts, with 6 courses on Nagios to come over 2009 and 2010. Around the corner, on 28 Oct 2009 at 9am he tipped off a once off, free live streaming of the OSMC presentation from MySQL guru Kristian Köhntopp on Monitoring MySQL – a great sneak peak into our legendary OSMC.
