Monitoring tools on Solaris 1

[Butterfly123]

Dear Gurus,

I am currently evaluating system monitoring tools / utilities on solaris (and some more unix versions).. I hav already evaluated Big Brother, Xsarte, Servercheck, mysysm and monitor (this one on AIX) to monitor Solaris OS performance..

Is anybody aware of any more freewares on the web which i can evaluate for the purpose of Solaris OS performance monitoring?

Any clues will be appreciated..

THanks

Hemant - Hemant

 

[bigscouse]

SE toolkit

http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/se3/

Ged Jones

Top man

 

[kwtso]

We are using Big Brother to monitor >10 sun boxes. It is a great tools which allows us to put in some customization scripts. Besides, we also use it to monitor network traffic polled from MRTG.

 

[Butterfly123]

Thanks folks!

As i said earlier, I hav already evaluated Big Brother, Xsarte, Servercheck tools.. I want to know if there are anymore freeware available on the net..

Appreciate ur comments..

Regards,
- Hemant

 

[Butterfly123]

Hey this SE-3.2.1 is a good tool man!
Thanks Top MAn!

Regds,

Hemant - Hemant

 

[Knatarajan]

Hello hemant,
This is natarajan.can u give some tips reg the Big brother configuration on sol8 machines.
with regards,
natarajan
sysadmin

 

[Butterfly123]

Hi Knatarajan,

U will need to create a user account to run bb with..
Installation is simple; run the script bbconfig.sh first.. U need to hav a webserver on ur system; HAv apache enabled on Sol8;

Here is the procedure:

2.1 Prerequisites
There are a lot of prerequisites that needs to be satisfied before proceeding with the installation of Big Brother. Check the following software has been installed in your Solaris server.
 Standard version of gcc
 GNU make utility
 A standard web server (Apache, iplanet, etc.)
Due to security reasons, it is recommended that Big Brother be installed and run as its own user than as root. Hence you should create a user account by the name “bb” and use this account to install and run Big Brother.
Download the Big Brother source file from

http://www.bb4.com

web site. The downloaded file will be in a gzipped tar format. Say bb18b3.tar.gz. Copy the file to /tmp directory and gunzip it using the following command.
#cp bb18b3.tar.gz /tmp
#gunzip bb18b3.tar.gz

This will create a tar image bb18b3.tar. This image has to be uncompressed to get the source code.
#tar –xvf bb18b3.tar

Uncompressing creates the following directory structure
/opt/Bb18b3/ referred as $BBHOME
/opt/bbvar/acks/ referred as $BBACKS
/data/ referred as $BBDATA
/disabled/ referred as $BBDISABLE
/hist/ referred as $BBHIST
/histlogs/ referred as $BBHISTLOGS
/logs/ referred as $BBLOGS

2.2 Installation Steps
Log in as the newly created Big Brother User “bb”. Make your present working directory as $BBHOME. Carry out the following steps.
>cd ./install
>. /bbconfig <type of OS>


This will show you the license agreement and will ask the following questions with which the environment for installation will be set. Answers for the questions are indicated in the brackets.
1. Operating System: (solaris)
2. Prevent the execution of BB as user 'root': (Yes)
3. What will be the user ID of BB [bb]: (bb)
4. Old-style directory structure [y/n]:
5. Use FQDN [y/n]:
6. What machine will be the BBDISPLAY: (hostname of the server)
7. What machine will be the BBPAGER: (hostname of the server)
8. Is this host a BBDISPLAY host [y/n]:
9. Is this host a BBPAGER host [y/n]:
10. Enter the default recipient: (root@localhost)
11. Enter the base URL for BB [/bb]: (/bb) {The web pages can be accessed by

http://hostname/bb}

12. Enter CGI directory [/home/www/httpd/cgi-bin]: (Big Brother’s cgi-bin directory favorably /opt/bigb/cgi-bin)
13. Enter the base URL of the CGI scripts [/cgi-bin]: (/cgi-bin)
14. Enter web server user id [nobody]: (Press Return)
15. Enter group name [nobody]: (Press Return)
Now the environment has been setup for the installation of Big Brother. Now do
cd ../src
make
make install
cd ../..
chown -R bb bbvar bb18b3











3. Configuration
After installation is successful Big Brother needs to be configured. As a first step link the web folder of Big Brother to the document root of the Web Server.
ln -s /opt/bb18b3/

http://www /<web

server doc root>/bb (where /

http://WWW is

the Document Root dir)

Make sure the permissions are correct. Configure your web server for this directory if need be. Also make sure that the web server follows symbolic links.

Before starting Big Brother Daemon, Big Brother needs to know which machines it should monitor and what are the specific settings it has to monitor. For that you should add the hosts you want to monitor in bb-hosts file. This file can be found under /opt/bb18b3/etc. Then add an entry for the host you want to monitor. Next section describes in detail for Configuring bb-hosts file. A sample host entry looks like this

192.168.100.102 ccr-solaris # BBDISPLAY BBNET

Note: Make sure you have Big Brother agent installed on the machines you want to monitor.

After updating the bb-hosts file it’s time to start the big brother Daemon and this is done by a simple script runbb.sh. Do the following to start the daemon

cd /opt/bb18b3
./runbb.sh start

Examine the BBOUT file for any errors. By default the BBOUT log file is located in $BBHOME. Wait for a couple of minutes and open your browser and you can see the web page of Big Brother which looks like the one below.

3.1 Configuring bb-hosts file
The etc/bb-hosts file controls where Big Brother looks for things and the actions that are taken. The format is identical to the standard /etc/hosts file, except with additional directives for Big Brother.

Basic format of etc/bb-hosts
Lines are of the format:
IP-ADDR HOSTNAME # DIRECTIVES
IP-ADDR: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Directives the Big Brother knows about are:

BBDISPLAY This host displays the HTML results

This host receives incoming status reports, generates the HTMLized status reports, the bb.html and bb2.html web pages. There may be more than one BBDISPLAY if you want redundancy. BBDISPLAY host execute the bbd daemon to collect reports, and run the web/mkbb.sh & web/mkbb.sh scripts to generate the bb.html and bb2.html pages. You'll need a Web server on this host to display the results.
BBPAGER This host acts as the notification server
This host receives requests to notify admins and processes those requests. There may be more than one BBPAGER as well, for redundancy. Of course, you'll be notified more than once per problem. BBPAGER hosts likewise run the bbd daemon so they can receive notification requests. To requests more than one BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER host, put the BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER directive on the config line for each host that acts as BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER.

BBNET Indicates that this host checks the ip network services
Many hosts can act as a BBNET. If you do have more than one BBNET, make sure that the bb-hosts file only contains the hosts that you will test against. You must be very careful because if a host is tested by many BBNETs then the status display for the services on that host will only show that last test status.

BBRELAY <hostname or IP address> The host defined is a relay host
This host will be relayed all incoming messages from any BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER hosts that has this directive defined on the same line as the BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER. So if a BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER entry in the bb-hosts file

Ftp Test for ftp service
smtp Test for smtp server
Pop3 Test host for pop3 server
Telnet Check telnet service
ssh Test ssh server
nntp Test nntp news server
dns Checks for name resolution server
dig Same check as dns but using the dig command if the command is available.
noping Don't do ping test for this host and display a clear dot.
noconn Don't do ping test for this host and don't generate any colored dot
dialup If host is down then display a clear dot otherwise display a green status
testip Use the IP address defined to execute network test. Don't use the hostname given.
bbd Test a remote BBDISPLAY/BBPAGER
This is a sample bb-hosts file:
#
# BIG BROTHER HOSTS FILE
#
192.168.100.102 ccr-solaris # BBDISPLAY BBPAGER ftp smtp pop3
192.168.100.106 ccr-unix12 #

http://ccr-unix12/

192.168.100.103 ccr-linux # BBNET !nntp

#ccr-solaris is the display and notification server.
#ccr-unix12 runs a web server which will be monitored
#ccr-linux is the host that runs ip network services checks
#it will check the ftp/smtp/pop3 services on ccr-solaris.
#then the http service on ccr-unix12 and finally it makes sure
#that nntp is SHOULD NOT be running on ccr-linux

3.2 Configuring Notification
Big Brother can be configured to notify administrators in the event of an alert. Notification can be of the form of an e-mail, sms, and pager. Entire BB notification configuration is specified in the etc/bbwarnsetup.cfg file. One more file associated with notification is etc/bbwarnrules.cfg. Here are some commonly used options that can be set.

svcerrlist: This contains a list of service/code pairs. The service name is the column found in the HTML display and the code is the value displayed on a numeric message. If a custom check needs to be added then the column name must have a corresponding code.

pagehelpcode: Numeric code to use when a user sends a manual notification.

ttyline: List of modems devices. More than one device can be specified

prefix: Prefix to use when dialing out
suffix: Suffix to use when dialing out (like a hangup)
3.3 Configuring multiple process for monitoring
Big Brother can be used to monitor multiple processes in the system
The PROCS & PAGEPROC variables in etc/bbdef.sh can be set with the names of the processes to monitor. But these two variables limit the number of other processes to monitor to only two.
Hence a more sensible way ... is to use the etc/bb-proctab file. This file contains definitions for all hosts all in a single file. This file just need to redistributed across all the hosts coming under the purview of Big Brother.
Host entries can be defined on multiple line entries for clarity in case you have many processes to check.

The format of etc/bb-proctab file is as follows

[hostname1]rocess list for yellow : process list for red
[hostname1]rocess list for yellow : process list for red
[hostname2]rocess list for yellow : process list for red
[hostname3]rocess list for yellow : process list for red
[hostname3]rocess list for yellow : process list for red

Hope this helps..

All the best,

Regards,

- Hemant
Networking and Systems Integration Group
Satyam Computer Services Ltd

 

[spenglerr]

Hi,

actually when I want a low-cost solution I monitor the important system parameters by a shell-script and send it via Email regularily to my client.

Additional: NON-FREEWARE to check:

BMG Patrol

or even better

Quest Foglight or (small enterprises: Quest I/Watch)

 

[Butterfly123]

Well, I have used BMC patrol for Unix monitoring.. Looking for some freeware..

Lemme know if u r aware of anything apart from BB, Servercheck, monitor, SE toolkit and Netsaint..

Regds,

- Hemant
Networking and Systems Integration Group
Satyam Computer Services Ltd