I have registred me to attend the open Splunk event in Stockholm. Within 24 hours I got an email telling that they do not want competitors at the event and would like to discuss the purpose of me attending.

I called the Splunk representative and told him that op5 thinks Splunk is a competitor in some cases and in some cases we have products that run in parallel at customer sites. We want to integrate op5 Monitor with Splunk because we have got the question a couple of times from customers and potential customers. My intention of attending the meeting is to get a better understanding of Splunk so op5 can integrate our products, so our customers get the products that suits them best. If Splunk wants to be part of the integration, the better.

The Splunk representative still do not want me to attend. At Splunk they will discuss this matter internally but so far, this is their view.

I would really like to make a parallel with another op5 competitor, Würth, at their event they invited op5 as key speaker and I really recommend Splunk to reconsider their decision.

• op5 Monitor Beta, virtual image in ovf format
• Try op5 Monitor Beta

The op5 Monitor Beta use Ninja as GUI and Merlin as a databasebackend.

–cut–

• Implementation of the missing Nagios cgi’s. (showlog, history,trends, notifications etc)
• Include Avail/SLA reports in Ninja  (Avail reports are an improved version of the Nagios avail reports and SLA is a new report type)
• Lots of bugfixes

–cut–

Links

• Ninja, Nagios Is Now Just Awesome
• Merlin, Module for Endless Redundacy and Loadbalancing In Nagios
• op5, a company with enterprise network- and systems management based on OpenSource.

I was reading the Swedish computer magazine, Tech World. There was an article about an appliance solution that could give a report about unused switch ports. The box PortIQ from Infoblox costs approximatly 10.000 Euro.

op5 has developed this feature at a customer site and is included with op5 Monitor, op5 has published the code as opensource.

This guide will describe howto get it running in op5 Monitor. op5 Monitor is vanilla Nagios with some addons so it should be no problem to follow this guide in a Nagios environment

Installation

1. Update your op5 Monitor or download the plugin and report script.

2. Create metadata for check_portstatus as $USER1$/check_portstatus -H $HOSTADDRESS$

in checkcommands.cfg:

# command 'check_portstatus'
define command{
    command_name                   check_portstatus
    command_line                   $USER1$/check_portstatus -H $HOSTADDRESS$
    }
 

3. mkdir /var/spool/check_portstatus

4. chown monitor:apache /var/spool/check_portstatus

5. cp /opt/monitor/op5/portstatus/portstatus.php /var/www/html/portstatus.php

6. Define your service i.e. services.cfg:

# service 'Portstatus'
define service{
    use                            default-service
    host_name                      gw
    service_description            Portstatus
    check_command                  check_portstatus
    }
 

The result

The screenshot below shows a Cisco switch with alot of unused ports.

Conclusions

This article shows how easy it is to modify Nagios and other opensource tools to give you what you want. Do not hesitate to contact me or op5 to help you enhance you Nagios or op5 installation.

Links

• op5
• op5 Monitor
• Nagios
• PortIQ appliance box from Infoblox
• Tech world

op5 Monitor is based on Nagios*, the industry standard for enterprise-class IT infrastructure monitoring. Until now, op5 Monitor has had to rely on the basics of standard Nagios Graphical User Interface (GUI) for presentation and overall user experience. With the release of op5 Monitor 4.2 we include a fully functional preview of a brand new GUI, now based on the Ninja Open Source project. The new GUI is based on a modern PHP architecture and is now shipped for real operation testing.

Usability, flexibility and visualization probably stands for more then 80% of overall customer value. Our solutions for full control of our customers IT systems hold a huge amount of both historical data and instant events. Making this information accessible and easy to understand for as many as possible is the single most effective value for our customers. And who is better to give us important feedback on GUI related features and functions then our customers? This is why we now choose to include an early version for test, evaluation and feedback purposes, all to secure the best for the coming official release of Monitor 5.0 later this year, says Jan Josephson, CEO op5 AB.

The new GUI with its flexible interface based on the PHP framework makes it much easier to provide customizations for customers specific needs. With the introduction of widget and support session based authentication it is now possible to fully personalize views and settings. The widget technology further provides a future standard way for two way synchronization and presentation of customer unique data and the presentation of it.

The ability to search, sort and filter vast data volumes has been greatly improved with pagination for views of hosts and services and the possibility to sort by column. The new improved search feature includes auto suggestion and let you search on hosts, services host groups and service groups.
These changes greatly improves the possibilities to answer to customer needs and to develop customized features that has not been possible until now due to the restrictions from the old GUI.
A new module for network visualization (the NagVis project) has been included in op5 Monitor 4.2. You can now visualize your infrastructure using three different map types;

• Auto map, a auto drawn topology map using parent / child relationships.
• Static Map makes it possible to put any object (host, service, host group or service group) on an image of choice.
• Geo map, uses Google maps API, drawing a map by using addresses or gps coordinates on your monitored objects. Object and status information as well as links can be included in the map. The maps can be visualized as widgets on the tactical overview or be used on big monitors in operation centers.
• Largest OSS-project in Network Monitoring, Nagios.

About op5 AB op5 AB is a world leading OSM – Open Source Management – company that delivers software based on open source for control of IT systems and networks. Its main products are op5 Monitor, op5 Statistics and op5 LogServer. The products are based on open source code that op5 further develops, packages, and sells as complete products and systems with services and support. p5 has a large selection of primarily European clients from different market segments for example AGA Linde Gas, The Swedish Customs Service (Tullverket) and other parastatals, several county councils, municipalities and municipal companies. op5 was founded in 2003. The company is based in Sweden with offices in Stockholm and Gothenburg.

www.op5.com

Next week, op5 will release the new Nagios GUI called Ninja. The license is GPL and several people has reported the GUI work perfectly well on vanilla Nagios. Ninja uses a database backend. Merlin, another op5 developed software feeds the Nagios information into the database.

Links:

• op5 -OpenSource based management software company
• Ninja- Nagios Is Now Just Awesome
• Merlin – Module for Effortless Redundancy and Loadbalancing In Nagios
• Try – Ninja GUI

Some screenshoots below:

 Geomap, based on google maps

Tactical overview, with widgets that could be dragged and dropped

Host details

Nagvis integration

The plugin used to gather the information is GPLd and developed by op5.

Links

• The article describing howto monitor vmware.
• op5 Monitor – Enterprise class supported monitoring solution based on Nagios.
• Nagios – OpenSource Enterprise class monitoring solution.
• Check_esx plugin created by op5
• op5 – The company behind he plugin.

http://www.op5.org/community/projects/op5-plugins

The plugins is also located in a Git repository and can be checked out from:

http://git.op5.org/git/

• Tobias Oitiker gave a very good presentation about the linux kernel caching and described how it affected RRDtools.
• Markus Almroth, describes Sysnagios which did the opposite of most monitoring projects. Sysnagios decentralized the configuration of systems and network monitoring in a controlled way. I will come back to this topic in my blog.
• Per Åsberg talked about Ninja, a new GUI for Nagios, done by op5.
• Andriy Skuratov, talked about and demonstrated a new version of Nagvis with integrated Google Maps and other good stuff.
• Ethan Galstad the founder of Nagios announced Ninja as the new GUI for Nagios.

During the Nordic meet on Nagios I meet alot of interesting people, learned alot and had good food and drinks.

I hope to see you next year at Nordic Meet on Nagios 2010!!!

Read more at http://www.op5.org/community/projects/merlin

The demo is hosted by Collax a op5 partner in Germany.

If you want to attend, register at:

http://www.collax.com/de/ueber-collax/events-collax-live/webcast-collax-monitoring-solution.html

—cut’n paste—

Welcome to Nordic Meet on Nagios 2009 (NMN2009) June 3-4th, the largest Nagios Meet in Scandinavia. The 2008 Meet was a great success! The event was filled to the last seat and a great atmosphere in great summer weather in Stockholm! You can watch a video from the 2008 event.

Take the opportunity to meet key open source profiles and discuss the future of their Nagios Related OSS Projects, listen to the latest news, market trends and case studies focusing on business value. There will be open discussions on development and technology challenges as well as hands on workshops. This year we develop the meet further with a longer program with more speakers from more projects, workshops and a whole lot of fun! We hope to meet you on Nordic Meet on Nagios 2009

—end cut’n paste—

I will be there…

• Code refactoring and bug fixes
• Possibility to turn on and off full text indexing
• Speed and robustness improvements to the query logic

Code refactoring and bug fixes

Over time as a project grows there comes need for refactoring. In this release we have refactored parts of the code to improve stability and maintainability. For example front-end controller design pattern was introduced in this release, which gave us the possibility to both improve security and simplify code. We fixed a possible message sorting issue and merged a couple of packages to simplify maintenance.

Possibility to turn on and off full text indexing

In op5 LogServer a user has 2 options for search in logs: one is the ‘host=test-host’ kind of search and the other is the full-text search – the ‘test-host’ kind of search, i.e. it just searches the whole log message for whatever you type. By default we create an index for full text search, that makes the full text search queries speedier. In some environments full text indexing of log messages are not really a good thing. For example if you have a lot of log messages from a firewall consisting messages that contains a lot of “non words”, binary data dumps and such. Log messages like that can hog your CPU
and affect the responsiveness of the op5 LogServer system.

You can now chose if you want to use full text indexing or not by a configurable setting in the GUI.

Note: If you turn off the full text index, searches using full text search will be slower.

Speed and robustness improvements to the query logic

Every search traverses the database by hour and ask it to return log messages up to the requested amount of matches, i.e. depending on how many messages you have chosen to view on the page. When the result of one hour is returned the query logic determines if it should query the database for another hour and also how many more matches that are required. This
gives us a more precise result.

This also leads us to a number of changes:

• “Unlimited search” mode as a special case is deprecated – now all the searches are done across all the DB
• The green line in the timeline now shows the time frame where the search was done to find the present results, even covering multiple days.
• The user can now stop the search (system will finish the search in current hour still – and then will stop)
• The interaction with the database is more clean and a number of possible deadlocks are eliminated.

Installation and Upgrade Notes

Upgrading requires op5 LogServer 3.0 or later. Upgrade is possible either by using yum or by using the .tar.gz install file available at http://www.op5.com/support/.

Documentation

Documentation for version 3.4 of op5 LogServer is available at http://www.op5.com/support/

Screenshots

op5 is a bronze sponsor and will have a booth where it will be possible to talk to me and my collegues face to face. My biggest problem is if I want to see Mamma Mia or meet Jon Maddog Hall.

For more info http://goopen2009.friprog.no/english

Support for 64bit OS

op5 Monitor 4.1 will support the 64bit versions of RedHat and CentOS.

New improved performance graphs

The new feature provides automatic graphing for all graphable performance data (based on pnp4Nagios). This means that you will get graphs for most of your hosts and services with no effort.

Smarter Navigation

Op5 have improved the navigation by making the integration  between the op5 Monitor gui and the configure tool tighter. Now op5 provide that by adding an icon next to each host and service that directs you to the configure page for that host or service, making the navigation easier and faster.

Brushing up the gui

Op5 have continued working with polishing the user interface. In the 4.1 release op5 have worked on the details making the user experience “smoother” with new icons and styles.

Buq squashing

Found bugs have been squashed, please see change log for more information.

Installation and Upgrade Notes

Op5 recommend users to upgrade from op5 Monitor 4.0.

Try op5 Monitor 4.1

You can download the software to try the new version.

Documentation

For upgrading and installing version 4.1 of op5 Monitor please see the manual.

Support

If you encounter any problems or have questions please don’t hesitate to contact op5 support:
Phone: +46 31 774 09 24
Mail: support@op5.com
Web: http://www.op5.com/support/

Open Source Management company op5 expands into Ireland

– Partners with Irish enterprise IT solutions company SecureLinx

Stockholm, the 18 December 2008 – Leading Open Source Management Company op5 partners with Irish enterprise IT solutions company SecureLinx. The new partnership is the latest move by op5 to expand its international channel business, which has grown with several new partners in key European markets during fall.

- op5 is growing and is now expanding in Europe. Working in partnerships with local expert companies like SecureLinx is fundamental to assure high quality customer satisfaction in any international market. We are excited about this partnership and we see great potential for business in Ireland, says Jan Josephson, Business Development Manager at op5.

Securelinx is an enterprise IT solutions company and leading Novell channel partner providing software, professional services, training and support options to customers in Ireland and UK.

Their solutions combine award-winning software with a unique blend of field experience and expertise to help customers better secure, simplify and manage their IT environments at low cost.

- We are partnering with op5 as we see a growing requirement from our enterprise customers to broaden our support portfolio to include a systems monitoring element. As a company with a strong track record with both Linux and Open Source solutions, we had a solid familiarity with the underlying technologies that op5’s tool sets use. The fact that these tool sets are further enhanced and professionalised by a successful company like op5 provides us with an excellent solution to confidently put before our customers, says Brian Farrell, Director, Securelinx.

op5’s products are all about getting control of everyday IT operations. The cost of IT is a growing headache for many enterprises. Maintenance, unplanned downtime and fault discovery is painful and can account for up to 80% of the overall IT expenses. op5 adds control in an easy-to-implement and use manner, featuring an intuitive user interface which enables customers to easily deploy the solution in their entire IT environment. The products work with most moderns systems, both hardware and software, and can, thanks to its open source code, easily be adapted to meet special requirements in each environment. The three main products are op5 Monitor, for monitoring systems and networks; op5 Statistics, which delivers understandable graphics of how systems are working and op5 LogServer, for managing logs and enabling a traceable IT environment.

This is a minor upgrade.

Whats new?

• Summary Reports
• Bidirectional editing of filters
• Hierarchical filters
• Configurable deafult filter per user
• Bugfixes

Read more about it in the release-notes and changelog

Background

I would like to have an alert if root has logged into my firewall. I think this is very important to know fast and where ever I am so I want a SMS sent to my cellphone. I have op5 Monitor with a GSM modem.

Theory

When root login a message will show up in the syslog i.e. /var/log/authlog

Nov 19 15:55:58 pedro sshd[12180]: Accepted password for root from 192.168.0.153 port 35896 ssh2

So I want op5 Monitor to detect this message in syslog and send a SMS if it occours.

The steps are:

• Send the message to op5 Logserver
• Create a filter that filter out that message
• Make op5 Monitor run this filter and send an alarm if it gets a hit.

Implementation

1-First step is to have a working op5 Logserver that get this message. I assume that a op5 Logserver is installed and configured in this guide.

In /etc/syslogd.conf I have the following line:

*.*                                                     @op5

It tells syslog to send every message to host op5, in this case it is my op5 Logserver, op5 Monitor and op5 Statistics machine. This is not recommended but my environment is very small.

2-Log in to op5 Logserver and verify that your login has been stored.

“Query builder”, enter in Host box, enter “Accepted password for root” in message.

3-Save the filter with a good name i.e. root_login_fw

4-Test that op5 Monitor can and detect the message

[root@op5 plugins]# ./check_ls_log -f root_login_fw -i 60 -c 0
CRITICAL - 1 matches for general filter 'root_login_fw':Accepted password for root from 192.168.0.153 port 35896 ssh2|query_time=0.05ms nr_matches=1;5;0

-f is filtername

-i is minutes back it should query the database

It works!

5-Create the op5 Monitor Service check on your firewall

Login to op5 Monitor

Click Configure

Pick the firewall in the list of hosts

Click Go

Click “Services for fw”

Pick “Add new service”, Click Go

Enter “Root Login” in Service Description

check_ls_log in check_command

check_command_args -f root_login_fw -i 60 -c 0

Enter the contact information.

Press Apply

Press “Test this service” to verify that it works

Press Save and you are done.

6-If you have logged in recently it should look something like this when looking att you service:

Links:

• op5
• op5 Monitor
• op5 Logserver
• op5 How-To integrate to logserver integration

We want to give something back to the community

We have built a successful business around several opensource components, such as Nagios, RRDTool, Cacti, syslog-ng, NSClient++, Linux and several hundred GNU programs and libraries.
A big thanks to all the hundreds of programmers for their efforts.
Now that we have addons around and on top of those projects, we feel it is only proper that we donate them back to the people whose very shoulders we stand on.

The code base for op5 Monitor reports and reports gui are free to download. Go to http://www.op5.org and follow the instructions.