- observium - lists.observium.org

DMI
by pechspilz 10 Aug '13

10 Aug '13

Hi, does anyone know if the results from the dmi agent script is available in Observium? So far I've been unable to locate it.

1 0

confg storage
by Eliezer Sousa 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

good afternoon. how can I configure to show me observium disk space of storages devices or all registered servers. ass eliezer

2 1

Observium Globe All Devices sit in Ocean
by Josh Hopper 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

What I have is more of a question.... * Environment: Sonicwall, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Dell PowerConnect 6224, Dell PowerConnect 3524, Dell PowerConnect 5448, ESX5 and ESX4 Description I have Observium 0.13.8.4256 installed. I believe this is the most updated version. I have entered a sysLocation on all of my devices and within the Observium GUI I set a sysLocation as well. All of my devices sit in the Atlantic ocean. Why? -- Sincerely, Joshua Hopper, A+ CE Network Administrator [cid:image001.jpg@01CE934A.6F0821F0] 420 3rd Ave NW Hickory NC 28601 Office: 828-449-1839x2160 | Cell: 828-855-7565

5 9

Re: [Observium] Snmppings
by Adam Armstrong 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

Yeah. There are some nasty SNMP implementations around. Cisco and netsnmp is pretty to rock solid in terms of responding. Anything else and you might be hitting SNMP bugs, too. Adam. Paul Gear <observium(a)gear.dyndns.org> wrote: >There are also some pretty dodgy SNMP implementations out there which >take an eternity to poll; poller-wrapper.py seems to do a decent job of >compensating for this. > >On 08/09/2013 07:43 AM, Adam Armstrong wrote: >> If a device is marked down, it'll tell you if it was because of ping or snmp in the eventlog. >> >> Either way, if you are having devices continually marked as down, it's an indicator of poor network connectivity or dodgy firewalling. >> >> Adam. >> >> Ryan Milton - MVS USA <RMilton(a)mvsusa.com> wrote: >> >>> One thing about Observium, that I find frustrating, is that devices that are definitely up, that are definitely pingable with no drops still show as occasionally being off-line, or down. Sometimes this is worse, or better depending on SVN version. >>> >>> The only remedy seems to be that I have to stop monitoring device. What good is that? Are there any other things that I can do to look and tweak? >>> Sent from my iPhone >>> _______________________________________________ >>> observium mailing list >>> observium(a)observium.org >>> http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium >> _______________________________________________ >> observium mailing list >> observium(a)observium.org >> http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium > >_______________________________________________ >observium mailing list >observium(a)observium.org >http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

2 1

Performance optimisation (incl. RAM disk vs. SSD)
by Paul Gear 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

Hi all, We've got some money in the budget to upgrade our struggling monitoring server, and i'm trying to optimise Observium. Here are our Observium installation stats: Total Up Down Ignored Disabled *Devices <http://observium.buq.org.au/devices/>* 153 <http://observium.buq.org.au/devices/> 138 up <http://observium.buq.org.au/devices/status=1/> 2 down <http://observium.buq.org.au/devices/status=0/> 1 ignored <http://observium.buq.org.au/devices/ignore=1/> 12 disabled <http://observium.buq.org.au/devices/disabled=1/> *Ports <http://observium.buq.org.au/ports/>* 8896 <http://observium.buq.org.au/ports/> 887 up <http://observium.buq.org.au/ports/state=up/> 118 down <http://observium.buq.org.au/ports/state=down/> 927 ignored <http://observium.buq.org.au/ports/ignore=1/> 6837 shutdown <http://observium.buq.org.au/ports/state=admindown/> We're currently running 4 cores, 12 GB RAM, 6 x 15K RPM 3.5" drives in RAID 10. We have about 20 GB of RRDs. Poller-wrapper.py runs with 32 workers and regularly goes over the 500-second mark. The web interface is quite sluggish despite php-xcache being installed. I'm wondering if anyone has done testing as to which is the better approach for RRD storage performance: RAM disk or SSD. RAM seems likely to offer better IOPS, but managing the RAM disk is obviously more overhead, and i'm concerned that syncing the RAM disk elsewhere will have too much of a performance hit while it happens (especially during reboot cycles). RAM is $25 per GB, whereas SSD is $3 per GB (or $25 per GB if you use "write intensive" SSDs - presumably these are rated for a larger number of lifetime writes?). My guess at a config for the new box: 12 cores, 64 GB RAM, 4 x 10K RPM 2.5" drives in RAID 10 for OS, 2 x SSD for /opt/observium/rrd. Any other recommendations about which hardware to put our money towards? Do we need to consider other issues like which type of file system to use for /opt/observium/rrd? Thanks in advance, Paul

4 4

Observium without DNS
by observium＠velder.li 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

Hi, I think it would be a good idea if it's possible to use observium without dns, or to overwrite the hostname used to get snmp data. I have some devices with internal and external IP adresses, and I'd like to use the internal IP for polling, but the external hostname for the device itself. Comments? Regards, Patrick

4 4

Re: [Observium] Performance optimisation (incl. RAM disk vs. SSD)
by Adam Armstrong 09 Aug '13

09 Aug '13

Go with the fastest processor cores you can find to make the web interface feel faster, especially with a lot of ports. Though, your install doesn't sound all that big... Adam. Paul Gear <observium(a)gear.dyndns.org> wrote: >_______________________________________________ >observium mailing list >observium(a)observium.org >http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

2 1

Re: [Observium] Snmppings
by Adam Armstrong 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

If a device is marked down, it'll tell you if it was because of ping or snmp in the eventlog. Either way, if you are having devices continually marked as down, it's an indicator of poor network connectivity or dodgy firewalling. Adam. Ryan Milton - MVS USA <RMilton(a)mvsusa.com> wrote: >One thing about Observium, that I find frustrating, is that devices that are definitely up, that are definitely pingable with no drops still show as occasionally being off-line, or down. Sometimes this is worse, or better depending on SVN version. > >The only remedy seems to be that I have to stop monitoring device. What good is that? Are there any other things that I can do to look and tweak? >Sent from my iPhone >_______________________________________________ >observium mailing list >observium(a)observium.org >http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

2 1

Snmppings
by Ryan Milton - MVS USA 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

One thing about Observium, that I find frustrating, is that devices that are definitely up, that are definitely pingable with no drops still show as occasionally being off-line, or down. Sometimes this is worse, or better depending on SVN version. The only remedy seems to be that I have to stop monitoring device. What good is that? Are there any other things that I can do to look and tweak? Sent from my iPhone

1 0

Graph Legend
by Colin Anderson 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

When viewing the graphs for a switch it cuts off the names of the interfaces in the Legend (such as "FastEthern") making it so you can't tell one interface from another. Does anyone know if this can be adjusted in the code so it is able to output longer interface names? Sample output screenshot: [cid:image001.png@01CE9454.EBF02270] Thanks in advance, Colin Anderson

2 1

bah re: override DNS
by Rob VanHooren 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

I think it would be a *terrible* idea for observium to work without dns. the fact that bofh Adam has pretty much forced it, is a very welcome sledgehammer against the sloppiness of incomplete node deployment habits. ditto with pingability imo. just be glad he didn't make A and PTR records have to match each other (and ^sysName$ too!) ... or at least have an extant PTR, something that is often overlooked. count your lucky stars; the only reason he probably didn't (yet?) is that it might have slowed things down a smidge. /grin/ worse, he could have run through checks against the entireties of rfcs 1122 and 1123, or also compared sysLocation against a LOC record query, before a node gets accepted. ps … perhaps some CNAME wrangling might work suitably for your case. split-horizon views in bind would do the trick for sure. for inspiration, have a chew through http://backreference.org/2010/02/01/geolocation-aware-dns-with-bind/ cheers, R. On 2013-08-08, at 4:26 AM, observium-request(a)observium.org wrote: >> I think it would be a good idea if it's possible to use observium without >> dns, or to overwrite the hostname used to get snmp data. >> I have some devices with internal and external IP adresses, and I'd like to >> use the internal IP for polling, but the external hostname for the device >> itself. >> >> Comments?

1 0

Re: [Observium] Lost all port after svn update
by Tom Laermans 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

Doesnt really help, you'd just be a week without ports with some bad luck :p Sent from my mobile, please excuse brevity and spelling errors. ----- Reply message ----- From: "Paul Gear" <observium(a)gear.dyndns.org> To: "Observium Network Observation System" <observium(a)observium.org> Subject: [Observium] Lost all port after svn update Date: Thu, Aug 8, 2013 12:01 /me reverts to cron.weekly for updates... :-) On 08/08/2013 06:49 PM, Nikolay Shopik wrote: > Downgrade to 4262 and re-run discovery > > On 08/08/13 12:07, Rory Schellekens wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> Today I did a svn update and afterwords the ./discovery -h none. But now it >> has marked all the ports as deleted. Anybody an idea how I can solve this? >> 2013-08-08 09:45:03 >> lo<http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=20/>Port was >> marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 >> 09:45:03 eth5 <http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=19/> Port >> was marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 09:45:03 >> eth4<http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=18/>Port was >> marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 >> 09:45:03 i4dd0 <http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=17/> Port >> was marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 09:45:03 >> i4dd1<http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=16/>Port was >> marked as DELETED >> >> With kind regards, >> >> Rory Schellekens >> >> ... _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium(a)observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

2 1

Lost all port after svn update
by Rory Schellekens 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

Hi all, Today I did a svn update and afterwords the ./discovery -h none. But now it has marked all the ports as deleted. Anybody an idea how I can solve this? 2013-08-08 09:45:03 lo<http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=20/>Port was marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 09:45:03 eth5 <http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=19/> Port was marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 09:45:03 eth4<http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=18/>Port was marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 09:45:03 i4dd0 <http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=17/> Port was marked as DELETED 2013-08-08 09:45:03 i4dd1<http://10.44.41.186/device/device=1/tab=port/port=16/>Port was marked as DELETED With kind regards, Rory Schellekens

5 4

crossbar history
by Peter Childs 08 Aug '13

08 Aug '13

6500/7600 chassis show the crossbar usage in details pane, and I see c6kxbar-1-0.rrd type files on the file system, but hovering over the crossbar bit doesn't show a historical graph, and I can't seem to see a historical graph in any of the other tabs for the device. Am I missing something, or just a site-specific issue? Cheers, Peter

2 2

Graphs not generating in Observium
by Mail List 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

Hi, We have an issue with our new Observium installation. We have performed an Ubuntu SVN install. All required packages and dependencies were installed and configuration steps followed. We have added many devices through Observium interface. However the graphs are not getting plotted. I couldn't find anything coming under the folder "/opt/observium/graphs". root@observe:/opt/observium/graphs# ls root@observe:/opt/observium/graphs# Can you please let us know what could be the issue and help us to correct it? Regards Joby

2 1

Linux Agent redesign
by Adam Armstrong 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

Hi All, It has turned out that the agent is a little bit difficult to work with, trying to extract data using only shell scripting is a bit of a pain. It's difficult for us to do any form of authentication or encryption, and parsing of the returned data can be a little haphazard because we rely on correct formatting. I've been thinking of alternative designs, possibly using PHP (Perl or Python would probably be better, but they're not viable languages for us) and either an embedded web server or hanging off inetd as it currently does. This would allow us to do encryption, to require some form of authentication and to pass around easier to parse JSON or serialize()'d arrays Personally, I almost always install a PHP CLI interpreter on my servers because I do 'shell' scripting in PHP, but what do the rest of you think? Would you be willing to install php-cli on your servers if you got the ability to do encrypted/authenticated/compressed agent connections? What about if we allowed you to funnel SNMP queries via the agent? (only for UNIX hosts, obviously) adam.

2 2

OS/distro version parser
by Adam Armstrong 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Hi All, We're testing a new version of the old 'distro' script used to detect distribution. Please run : ./scripts/os From inside your observium directory on updated installation (you may need to chmod 755 it first). I get: root@alpha:/home/observium/dev# scripts/os Linux|3.8.0-19-generic|amd64|Ubuntu|13.04 root@alpha:/home/observium/dev# The final part is the distro release. Please reply to this post if your distro release is returned as empty. The script might not return a distribution value for non-Linux OSes, this is normal. We're trying to make sure it can always ascertain the distro version and type. Thanks, adam.

4 7

Alerting, how to configure
by Rory Schellekens 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Hi all, What is the status of Alerting for Observium? Also I don't see any documentation about it. The main goal is to add our own alarms to Observium. With kind regards, Rory Schellekens

2 5

Sensors
by simon schaller 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

hello all, i try to add sensors in my observium and i know that there is sensors in my servers. is there somenone who can explain me how to add it please? thanks to read this mail, schaller simon

3 2

Permissions Issue:
by Ravindra Gupta 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Dear Team, Still we are facing below issue when we have click add device option in web panel .I have configured observing in Centos. I have been following many URL but did not get any solution. Error You have insufficient permissions to view this page. #tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log File does not exist: /opt/observium/html/images/no-48.png, referer: http://localhost/addhost/ I am waiting for your help...

3 3

Re: [Observium] Pages Missing CSS
by Tom Laermans 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

I would, yes. (create a stable branch) And yes, I broke the thread with my mobile client especially for you :D Sent from my mobile, please excuse brevity and spelling errors. ----- Reply message ----- From: "Nikolay Shopik" <shopik(a)inblock.ru> To: "Observium Network Observation System" <observium(a)observium.org> Subject: [Observium] Pages Missing CSS Date: Mon, Aug 5, 2013 17:08 Would you introduce "stable" branch if someone start paying for it? :-D You see fixes are fixes, but most bugs comes when you start introducing new feature called "global domination" and this is where things get worse then just getting fixes. Its just selecting between I need this fix, but this brake that, because of new thing here, and I need choice what are more important for me. I know fixing bugs are boring, and introducing new features (yay \o/) are more fun. :) But its understandable why no stable exist for now, no man power to do qa and backport shit here and there, like in any pet projects, muhahaha. On 02/08/13 01:05, Adam Armstrong wrote: > On 2013-08-01 21:52, Job Snijders wrote: >> Isn't it your job to do QA? >> >> If you favor stability why would you do 'svn up' on a production >> element? :) > > Quite right. And for people who can't or don't want to do this > themselves, we can take their money in exchange for managing their > installation updates and maintenance :) > > adam. > _______________________________________________ > observium mailing list > observium(a)observium.org > http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium(a)observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

1 0

Re: [Observium] Permissions Issue:
by Tom Laermans 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Dear User, Please read the responses to your question instead of sending it again and again. It serves no purpose other than you getting ignored completely by mailing list members. The error in the logs is completely unrelated. Sent from my mobile, please excuse brevity and spelling errors. ----- Reply message ----- From: "Ravindra Gupta" <ravindragupta9(a)gmail.com> To: "Observium Network Observation System" <observium(a)observium.org> Subject: [Observium] Permissions Issue: Date: Tue, Aug 6, 2013 09:20 Dear Team, Still we are facing below issue when we have click add device option in web panel .I have configured observing in Centos. I have been following many URL but did not get any solution. Error You have insufficient permissions to view this page. #tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log File does not exist: /opt/observium/html/images/no-48.png, referer: http://localhost/addhost/ I am waiting for your help...

1 0

Re: [Observium] patch for rrdtool syntax
by Adam Armstrong 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

My guess is that tobi won't release something which needlessly breaks a lot of existing stuff because of ocd parser code. :) Peter Childs <pchilds(a)staff.iinet.net.au> wrote: >_______________________________________________ >observium mailing list >observium(a)observium.org >http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

1 0

decoupling UI instances from pollers/main instance
by Peter Childs 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

As a bit of thought food I have had some interesting success in decoupling a 'UI' instance of observium from the instance that is 'polling' etc (I will call that the 'main' instance). I installed another deployment of observium using the same SQL instance as the 'main' instance. The issues then are access to the RRDtool data. I complied a 'new' version of rrdtool on both main and 'ui' instance boxes from 'trunk' of rrdtool development. The current trunk has support for the 'FETCH' command from rrdcached (usually rrdcached is only used for caching writes to reduce IO load). I ran rrdcached instance on the 'main' box, and configured $config['rrdcached'] to point to the IP/port of the main box's rrdcached process. As rrdcached is looking for 'relative' names to the path it is running in I so I hacked rrdtool.inc.php (see below as example — do not apply this patch) There were various issues with graph syntax that cropped up due to changes in the syntax parsing in the 'trunk' version of RRDtool, but pretty easy to work around those with some minor formatting changes (I'm sure I haven't found them all). The other issue is that for various composite graphs 'is_file( $rrd_filename )' is called — I hacked around this by just dumping all the rrd files via rsync (nasty) on the local box. I assume this could be worked around with a rrd-file-exists() type function that could say 'yes' for 'remote' rrd files (I'm not sure yet how to determine that via the rrdcached protocol if at all possible… perhaps there are other possible solutions …) When rrdtool graph now draws a graph it hits rrdcached on the main box, gets all the metrics, and presto … So far I notice that Misc graph fails — see above .. Usually some syntax causing the 'new' parser to get sad Speed — there are noticeable delays in drawing some of the graphs as you whip around the UI. Its not 'glacial', and it is potentially not the end of the world, but I'd like to understand where these delays come from with decoupled rrdtool — I have a feeling that potentially the rrdcached is not dealing with a pile of concurrent requests well — there may be some ways to make this better, and/or work around this. Why oh why? Currently in my 'day job' we run lots of different systems for different networks doing metrics gathering and display. Most of them are 'topped' out despite large amounts of time over the years optimising them, putting in 'faster' stuff etc. I'd like a metric(s) backend that can eat whatever we need, and eats more based on adding more commodity hardware. If my metrics backend can 'talk' rrdcached protocol, and systems like Observium can use this, then I feel like this might be a 'good thing'. Need more polling, just split the pollers. Need more UI goodness, just add more UI nodes behind a http load balancer. Some of the new metrics backends have some interesting stuff — specifically I'm looking at the 'not-released-yet' OpenTSDB. I'm pretty sure it is not the 'right' thing for simple installations, but for larger platforms it looks appealing. Thoughts? Cheers, Peter Various hacks pjchilds@uitest:/opt/observium$ svn diff includes/rrdtool.inc.php Index: includes/rrdtool.inc.php =================================================================== --- includes/rrdtool.inc.php (revision 4254) +++ includes/rrdtool.inc.php (working copy) @@ -107,6 +107,7 @@ if ($config['rrdcached']) { + $options = str_replace( $config['rrd_dir']."/", '', $options ); fwrite($rrd_pipes[0], "graph --daemon " . $config['rrdcached'] . " $graph_file $options"); } else { fwrite($rrd_pipes[0], "graph $graph_file $options"); @@ -158,6 +159,7 @@ $cmd = "$command $filename $options"; if ($command != "create" && $config['rrdcached']) { + $options = str_replace( $config['rrd_dir']."/", '', $options ); $cmd .= " --daemon " . $config['rrdcached']; }

1 0

patch for rrdtool syntax
by Peter Childs 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

Gday folks. I have been looking at the 'trunk' version of rrdtool where some differences exist in the parsing of 'graph' commands. The attached patch prevents 'Unused Arguments' when rrdtool graph is called with 'empty' argument bits. I assume I have probably 'missed' some bits, and I understand this doesn't impact Observium users yet with currently released Ubuntu rrdtools packages, but I assume at some stage it will impact, and it might be good to 'miss' that impact ? Cheers, Peter

2 2