Lol…I will repost
Adam, I separate list that is independent would be good also…I hope others reading this will voice their support for ping only device support!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks
Please read further for details
Adam,
I was able to get this all working, thanks for your help. Please excuse me if I am preaching to the choir but I do have some feedback.
I want to start out by saying that I would love it if all devices supported SNMP, that would be ideal, but reality is that there are devices that will never have SNMP agents on them. In this particular case, it’s a banks ATM’s. For security reasons, SNMP will never be a feature for these devices. There are other examples as well, for instance, I also want to my ISP’s router so I can tell when I go down, are they down as well. So, ping only devices are abundant and persistent, they will not be going away.
Setting up a probe will get me by, but there are several problems. The first is it seems you need to associate the probe with an existing host...so it looks like the probe is for that host (even though it is not). What happens if I delete the host...will the probes go away? Also, I have not yet seen a notification, but does the notification show the hosts name associated with the probe? If so, that will be confusing to techs who might not be aware they have to read further.
What is really needed is the ability to add a device that is ping only and stand alone, not dependent on any other host. Obviously, all the info for that device would be unavailable except ping times but this would be much clearer. I think, given how important ping only devices can be, it should be a priority to get this right.
Finally, let me say that I have worked in the past with MRTG and HP Openview and more recently with NagiosXI, PRTG and Shinken. Observium is BY FAR, the best of them. A ping only host is one of the few things that they all can do, but you cannot.
Thanks for listening, if you want, I would be happy to put in a feature request.
From: adama@observium.org adama@observium.org Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 12:56 PM To: Tony Guadagno tonyg@guadagno.org; 'Observium' observium@observium.org Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
No one else is reading because at some point I accidentally replied directly instead of to the list 😊
But I did now!
Adam.
From: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Sent: 13 April 2022 17:54 To: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
Adam, I separate list that is independent would be good also…I hope others reading this will voice their support!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks
From: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org <adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 12:52 PM To: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
This is why we recommend the probe is attached to the Observium server’s own device entry in Observium.
The ping-only host thing isn’t feasible in the existing devices paradigm, it would break the UI and a lot of other expectations about devices. Observium is 95% “showing data we got from SNMP”.
The thing we’d likely create is a separate list of devices that didn’t support SNMP and didn’t actually interact with anything that currently exists in Observium, except probes, so we’d need a bunch of exceptions to the probe code to handle things with a device record and things without in the probes code.
No one seems to ask much about it once we show them how to do the probes workaround, so we don’t look at it much.
Adam.
From: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Sent: 13 April 2022 17:22 To: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
Adam,
I was able to get this all working, thanks for your help. Please excuse me if I am preaching to the choir but I do have some feedback.
I want to start out by saying that I would love it if all devices supported SNMP, that would be ideal, but reality is that there are devices that will never have SNMP agents on them. In this particular case, it’s a banks ATM’s. For security reasons, SNMP will never be a feature for these devices. There are other examples as well, for instance, I also want to my ISP’s router so I can tell when I go down, are they down as well. So, ping only devices are abundant and persistent, they will not be going away.
Setting up a probe will get me by, but there are several problems. The first is it seems you need to associate the probe with an existing host...so it looks like the probe is for that host (even though it is not). What happens if I delete the host...will the probes go away? Also, I have not yet seen a notification, but does the notification show the hosts name associated with the probe? If so, that will be confusing to techs who might not be aware they have to read further.
What is really needed is the ability to add a device that is ping only and stand alone, not dependent on any other host. Obviously, all the info for that device would be unavailable except ping times but this would be much clearer. I think, given how important ping only devices can be, it should be a priority to get this right.
Finally, let me say that I have worked in the past with MRTG and HP Openview and more recently with NagiosXI, PRTG and Shinken. Observium is BY FAR, the best of them. A ping only host is one of the few things that they all can do, but you cannot.
Thanks for listening, if you want, I would be happy to put in a feature request.
From: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org <adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 11:19 AM To: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
Same way you alert on everything else, it’s just another entity type, similar to status with ok/alert status
https://docs.observium.org/entities/#probes
Adam.
From: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Sent: 13 April 2022 16:17 To: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
Oh, so you just pick a host in the pulldown, but that gets ignored when you use -H? ok. is there a way to alert on a probe?
From: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org <adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 11:12 AM To: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
You just override the default arguments on the probe, the documentation should explain that. Host is *almost* always -H
Adam.
From: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Sent: 13 April 2022 15:48 To: Observium <observium@observium.orgmailto:observium@observium.org> Cc: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org Subject: RE: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
Adam, I have been looking at probes, but the thing I don’t understand is how to add a probe when the device is not listed in Observium. I tried to overwrite the pulldown, but it does not allow that. Is there a way to add a device to the list?
From: observium <observium-bounces@observium.orgmailto:observium-bounces@observium.org> On Behalf Of adama--- via observium Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2022 10:44 AM To: 'Observium' <observium@observium.orgmailto:observium@observium.org> Cc: adama@observium.orgmailto:adama@observium.org Subject: Re: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
This is mentioned in the probes documentation. Just create ICMP probes on the Observium-server entry (or the closest partitioned poller)
We might do something specific at some point, but it’ll basically just be the same thing but with the probes separated into a different list.
Adam.
From: observium <observium-bounces@observium.orgmailto:observium-bounces@observium.org> On Behalf Of Tony Guadagno via observium Sent: 13 April 2022 15:41 To: Observium <observium@observium.orgmailto:observium@observium.org> Cc: Tony Guadagno <tonyg@guadagno.orgmailto:tonyg@guadagno.org> Subject: [Observium] ping only device monitoring
Hi, I know this has been asked and answered before, but I cannot find anywhere to search old threads, so I need to ask again….
How do I configure Observium to monitor a device with ping but no SNMP ability?
Thanks Tony