Best method install of Nagios/Cacti

[spoonman]

Just needing some info// I've chosen to use Nagios/plugins along side my cacti installation on my Debian server to monitor Windows stuff// How should i run the nagios on my server, just a plain install of nagios and it has to be running?? then use whatever scripts i'd like to use in my scripts dir, and the client piece running on whateva Win box??? Just curious on how some people have thiers setup///???


Thanks

[Exo7]

Hi

You have several choices to make at this point :
- who will be in charge of the polling ? both ?
- howto keep both configurations synchronized
- does the supervised perimeter make it possible to have both software on the same machine without killing it ?


Here is what I do :

- use Nagios to do all the polling except for getting traffic data and very specific data like NBAR statistics on routers.
- enable perfdata processing in Nagios and use Nagiosgraph to put data into rrd file.
- create several datasource & graph templates in Cacti so I can use the rrd file created by Nagios very simply.
- use a modified graph_view.php so I can search device by their name instead of their ID -found in this forum.
- link every service in Nagios to their graph in Cacti thanks to extended service info.

That's the basic picture to get things working.
I also need to have Thold patch for Cacti so that things polled by Cacti could be reported to Nagios via passive checks should something gets wrong. I plan to make this last part very soon.

There is an other way to do it : let Cacti do the pollings, and have Nagios use the check_rrd plugin to check if a limit have been crossed.



You don't have to have a client on your windows boxes if you monitor them by SNMP.
Public services like http, ftp, dns etc) could be checked by their corresponding plugins.

[spoonman]

Thanks for the reply,
What i'l like to do is keep Cacti polling since I"ve had it setup for a while, I was just interested in monitoring some Win servers and things..I would like to know exactly what I need to install where just to use nagios and nsclient.exe// Do I need to install the nagios on my debian server and just use the scripts and make sure the nsclient is running on each win server i want monitored? I really dont want to use the Nagios interface, like the web piece, i like cacti primarily!

Thanks

[gordho]

been scouring the forums looking for more detailed info on how to get the rrd's that nagios is creating via nagiosgraph to show in cacti but i can't get it to work. nagiosgraph is running and i can view the graphs in nagios. cacti is running and i can view the graphs it is generating on localhost for cpu, ping, load, etc. can anyone give some detailed instructions on how to get these rrd's created by nagiosgraph to display in cacti? exo7, i saw your postings here and in here:

http://forums.cacti.net/about9274.html& ... agiosgraph

i am obvioulsy missing something though because i don't see anywhere in the instructions where it points to the rrd that is created by nagiosgraph. thanks to anyone that can help with this!!

[Exo7]

When you add a new datasource, you can enter the path to a .rrd file.
If this field is left empty, Cacti will create a new .rrd file in its défault folder. Obviously, you want to point to the right .rrd file generated by nagiosgraph.

That's why you have to define your own datasource template. The otherway around, you could customize nagiosgraph map file to build .rrd file the way that cacti original datasources expect them.

Note that the datasource need to be marked as "non active", so cacti won't try to update this .rrd file itself.