As far as I know, hostnames are strictly required for Observium to talk to a device. If you cannot get DNS records set, or implement some sort of customized DNS server setup, you will have to use /etc/hosts entries (which is basically a custom DNS server setup, just not as elegant/flexible... and its probably somewhat slower when dealing with a lot of addresses).

Observium can't resolve an IP to an IP because it isn't a hostname. Host file (and DNS A/AAAA record) lookups don't work "backwards" like that.

Also, a hosts file pre-filled with a generically syntaxed hostname for each IP address within any of the subnets which you wish to monitor would pretty much never have to be updated. If you ever have any new IP ranges come into play, you would simply have to append the generic entries for it to the hosts file. What else would there be to manage/maintain? It certainly wouldn't require a full-time role.

If you did this, anytime you have a device on an IP without a DNS record, you could add it with the generic hostname.

The only other option would be to do some pretty involved patching of your Observium install, which almost assuredly WOULD be a nightmare to maintain.

On 05/05/2016 07:02 PM, Ivan Jukic wrote:

The reason why I ask this is that. I've successfully added a device by Hostname, deleted it then tried via IP Address and get "Can't resolve 10.0.0.1". Even though, the hostname/IP address is still in the hosts file.

Furthermore, we literally have millions of IP Addresses (both public and private) so managing this would require a full-time role.

Is there any way we can add devices without using hostnames?

Cheers,

Ivan
On 6 May 2016 at 08:29, Ivan Jukic <ijukic13@gmail.com> wrote:
I was thinking to do that. But I wanted to avoid that all together. So just to confirm, Observium can only add devices by hostname only and not IP Address?

Cheers,

Ivan
On 6 May 2016 at 08:21, Joseph Zancocchio <joseph@nyi.net> wrote:
It would probably be easiest to use a small script to generate a list of "hostnames" in whatever format you'd like for the IP(s) in the subnet that don't have any DNS records (perhaps something like 10.0.0.1 -> 10-0-0-1.noDNS.<yourdomain>, or whatever), and then add corresponding entries to /etc/hosts for those hosts. Then, you can add the range using that list of hostnames.

On 05/05/2016 05:41 PM, Ivan Jukic wrote:
Hi All,

I have many devices in our network that do no have hostnames and nor do I want to maintain DNS records for devices that do as this will be a nightmare to managed.

Is there a way I can simply add a whole subnet range to Observium without using hostname?

Cheers,

Ivan
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