[Nagios-users] Parenting vs Dependencies
I know that this has been discussed ad nauseam and I have read quite a bit of those discussions this morning and over the preceding weekend. I still am at a bit of a loss. I have a pretty firm understanding of parenting and dependencies and how they both work. I think I have a good grasp on what we need in our environment but I seem to be missing the point in explaining this to my boss. So here is an overview of what I have to monitor, what my boss is asking, and what I think we need and maybe someone can beat some sense into me. I have a medium sized network (100-200 hosts). Hosts are in cabinets on site (no off site monitoring yet) Cabinets are not setup by subnet (I think this is fairly normal) 1 switch per cabinet Multiple subnets across the farm The boss and I agree that the switch in each cabinet needs to be part of our monitoring setup and be part of some sort of parenting/dependency. This is where we cease seeing eye to eye. For the purpose of making this easy lets say we are dealing with three subnets and ten cabinets only. Here is what the boss wants (at least as far as I can understand): Setup three hosts per cabinet to represent the three subnets, that actual IP would be the IP of the switch. Parent the hosts in the cabinet to these and parent these to the gateways for the subnet. This is, with the parameters above, thirty extra hosts, and IMO a management nightmare. Since the switch is not part of the route my thought is that we parent in the normal manner as I understand it, host parents to router, and so on and at that point we would make the hosts have a dependency on the switch through which their connection passes. The current setup doesn't take into account the switches at all but rather is setup to where each host is parented to it's gateway IP and that has been working rather well but if a switch dies we need to be able to see that via nagios and not have 20 or servers and their services going off all at once.. I cannot see why adding tens of special hosts for the boss's parenting solution will help anything in the long run. Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to respond to this as I probably haven't explained very well to begin with. Best Regards, Mark L. Potter Systems Engineer Academy Sports Outdoors- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/___ Nagios-users mailing list Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null
Re: [Nagios-users] Parenting vs Dependencies
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:nagios-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 11:14 AM To: nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Nagios-users] Parenting vs Dependencies I have a medium sized network (100-200 hosts). Hosts are in cabinets on site (no off site monitoring yet) Cabinets are not setup by subnet (I think this is fairly normal) 1 switch per cabinet Multiple subnets across the farm The boss and I agree that the switch in each cabinet needs to be part of our monitoring setup and be part of some sort of parenting/dependency. This is where we cease seeing eye to eye. For the purpose of making this easy lets say we are dealing with three subnets and ten cabinets only. Here is what the boss wants (at least as far as I can understand): Setup three hosts per cabinet to represent the three subnets, that actual IP would be the IP of the switch. Parent the hosts in the cabinet to these and parent these to the gateways for the subnet. This is, with the parameters above, thirty extra hosts, and IMO a management nightmare. Since the switch is not part of the route my thought is that we parent in the normal manner as I understand it, host parents to router, and so on and at that point we would make the hosts have a dependency on the switch through which their connection passes. The current setup doesn't take into account the switches at all but rather is setup to where each host is parented to it's gateway IP and that has been working rather well but if a switch dies we need to be able to see that via nagios and not have 20 or servers and their services going off all at once.. I cannot see why adding tens of special hosts for the boss's parenting solution will help anything in the long run. Both solutions sound overly complex to me. It seems to me that you only need to add the 10 switches, with their own IP's, as parents. I expect that you shouldn't really care what subnet a server is on through that switch, you should only be thinking about physical connections. If Switch1 goes down, what servers are connected to it and unreachable as a result? Do you think the switch could fail in such a way that one of the subnets would work and the others won't? It's been my experience that a switch works or it doesn't, outside of human error. The parents directive is used to determine network outages (down v.s. unreachable) and would represent the problem correctly if your switch is down. In your situation I would end up with something like -- Host (subnet1) has parent Switch1 has parent Router1 Host (subnet2) has parent Switch1 has parent Router1 Host (subnet1) has parent Switch2 has parent Router1 Host (subnet3) has parent Switch2 has parent Router2 And so forth. Is there some additional complexity that I'm not grasping? Using dependencies _would_ add the tens of extra definitions that you don't want because you'd need a host dependency for host1 - switch1, then another for switch1 - router1, etc, etc. -- Marc - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Nagios-users mailing list Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null
Re: [Nagios-users] Parenting vs Dependencies
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:nagios-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marc Powell Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 11:40 AM To: nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Parenting vs Dependencies The parents directive is used to determine network outages (down v.s. unreachable) and would represent the problem correctly if your switch is down. In your situation I would end up with something like -- Host (subnet1) has parent Switch1 has parent Router1 Host (subnet2) has parent Switch1 has parent Router1 Host (subnet1) has parent Switch2 has parent Router1 Host (subnet3) has parent Switch2 has parent Router2 Ack. Switch2 has parent Router2 only. ;) -- Marc - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Nagios-users mailing list Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null
Re: [Nagios-users] Parenting vs Dependencies
Mark, On Feb 11, 2008 12:13 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: this to my boss. So here is an overview of what I have to monitor, what my boss is asking, and what I think we need and maybe someone can beat some I know listening to the boss is good for your long term employment, however, who has to troubleshoot the environment should you get an alert? Setup what ever makes the most since for identifying root cause and narrowing down a problem -- neither way suggested is wrong, just start with what's easiest to get setup today. Best, Justin -- Attention Sales And Marketing Professionals Who Serve B2B Executives http://hittpublishingdirect.com/ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse012070mrt/direct/01/ ___ Nagios-users mailing list Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null
