Monitoring Atempo Time Navigator Server Values with Zabbix

Despite how unlikely it may be that any other Zabbix users are also Atempo Time Navigator users, I've decided to post my Time Navigator monitoring scripts and methods. I'm using Time Navigator 4.1, your mileage with other versions may vary.

I've made a tarball containing everything you'll need (besides Zabbix and a running Time Navigator server!) to get this up and running.

I am monitoring several values from the Time Navigator server with Zabbix. Some of these values may only be of any real use over a long period of time to observe trends. This method monitors the following values:

• Number of Catalog connections
• Number of Catalog cells
• Number of free Catalog cells
• Number of Catalog objects
• Number of Catalog object instances
• Number of defined cartridges
• Number of backed up files
• Number of objects processed on last cycle
• Volume of backed up files
• Volume of backed up disk

Because none of these values are going to be changing quickly, the XML template included in the distribution is set to collect values every 86400 for most items and every 3600 seconds for the connections and free cells.

There are a few prerequisites for this to work.

• Your Time Navigator server runs Linux
• Your Time Navigator admin/privileged account is called “root”
• Your Time Navigator installation has access to “tina_report” and “tina_acct” commands
• You don't mind allowing NOPASSWD sudo access to a single script
• You don't mind allowing sudo access to said script without a TTY

To monitor the Time Navigator server values, I've used the Zabbix agent's “UserParameter” functionality along with a custom script that grabs the values using standard Time Navigator tools. The script is called “tina.sh” and is written in bash and is setup to return one value per call. I've created a directory ”/etc/zabbix/scripts” to hold all such scripts on my monitored hosts. Thess instructions assume this is where the “tina.sh” file will be located. If you want to put it somewhere else, you'll have to make a couple edits which should be straight forward.

To configure the zabbix agent (on the Time Navigator server):

1. Create the directory ”/etc/zabbix/scripts” on the Time Navigator servers
2. Copy the “tina.sh” script to ”/etc/zabbix/scripts”
3. Change ownership recursively to “zabbix.zabbix” on ”/etc/zabbix/scripts”
4. Add the line “UserParameter=tina[*],sudo /etc/zabbix/scripts/tina.sh $1 $2” to your zabbix agent configuration file (zabbix_agentd.conf in my case)
5. Add the line “zabbix ALL=NOPASSWD: /etc/zabbix/scripts/tina.sh” to ”/etc/sudoers”
6. Ensure that any line reading “Defines requiretty” is commented out in ”/etc/sudoers”

Done! You've configured the agent.

The “zabbix-timenavigator-1.0.tar.gz” file contains an XML template suitable for import into Zabbix with pre-defined items, triggers and graphs. This file must be imported into Zabbix using the web GUI.

To import the XML:

• Open a session with the Zabbix GUI
• Browse to the “Configuration” page
• Click on the “Import/Export” linux
• Browse your local system for the XML file
• Import it!
• Once imported, link your Time Navigator server “Host” with the imported template (Template_TimeNavigator)

You're done!

If everything went well, Zabbix is now collecting values from the Time Navigator server, ready to trigger if your free cells get low and provide some graphs for looking at long terms trends.

I figured out how to upload files! Download all required files in one tar.gz: zabbix-timenavigator-1.0.tar.gz