Monitoring solution for...

[M.Arnoldussen]

Hello!

I try to keep it simple and short, that’s why I also made a network diagram, please take a look at it.

The company I work for does a lot of management and monitoring on Windows based devices, mainly Windows servers. It’s my job to expand this monitoring to non-Windows based devices, like routers, switches, printers, storage solutions, VMware servers, tape units etc.

At the moment we work with the application Kaseya, a great management and monitoring solution but when you take a look at the abilities of SNMP and compare it with applications like Cacti, Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix or Zenoss, it doesn’t even come close.

But the main reason we use Kaseya is because we don’t use VPN tunneling to connect with our customers. And that is also the main problem I have now. With Kaseya it’s possible to install an agent anywhere you want and it will talk to your Kaseya server without VPN tunneling. I’m looking for a solution that a server (with maybe Cacti, Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix, Zenoss etc.) can get SNMP information from multiple non-Windows devices in the customers network, but without VPN tunneling and without installing a server in the customers network. What I think I need is something like a collector, that can be installed on a Windows server that is already present in the customers network. Please see the fast made network diagram.



I would like to see a solution for this that is free and works with nice graphs (back-end RRD?) and with the possibility to set your own OID’s, interval for polling and reporting (alerts(thresholds), dashboards, trend analyzes, etc.)

Does someone have this solution for me? Let me know! I already have a test Cacti, Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix and Zenoss server running.

Thank you very much!

[richlv]

zabbix sounds like a perfect solution for this... until you mention running remote service on windows

there's a solution called zabbix proxy, which does just that - runs on a device and connects to the zabbix server to get configuration and report data. but it does not work on windows.

so what i would suggest - deploy small form factor devices, maybe embedded ones, running zabbix proxies in those remote environments. the benefit is that they are not depending on some other system and operating system being running, you can deploy and upgrade them independently etc.

[jthakrar]

Yes, Zabbix is indeed an excellent solution.
You can deploy a Zabbix appliance/virtual machine that runs on/inside the Windows machine.

You mentioned that Kaseya works without requiring a VPN tunnel - not sure what you mean by that. There is very likely some kind of network re-routing/port-forwarding/network-magic happening that allows the Kaseya component on your company's network (private subnet?) to talk to the Kaseya component on your client's network (private subet?).

There are a couple of ways to implement Zabbix in your environment.

First and foremost is a distributed, proxy-based solution. In this, the "proxy asynchronously" sends data to Zabbix.

The second approach is to use a synchronous approach in which an "external check" can be defined for each remote site (or portion thereof) which initiates data retrieval from the remote site (that's why I call it synchronous).

And then you can have a hybrid approach.

-------------------
Jayesh
Mikoomi - enterprise monitoring made virtual
(www.mikoomi.com)

[M.Arnoldussen]

Yes, Zabbix is indeed an excellent solution.
You can deploy a Zabbix appliance/virtual machine that runs on/inside the Windows machine.

You mentioned that Kaseya works without requiring a VPN tunnel - not sure what you mean by that. There is very likely some kind of network re-routing/port-forwarding/network-magic happening that allows the Kaseya component on your company's network (private subnet?) to talk to the Kaseya component on your client's network (private subet?).

There are a couple of ways to implement Zabbix in your environment.

First and foremost is a distributed, proxy-based solution. In this, the "proxy asynchronously" sends data to Zabbix.

The second approach is to use a synchronous approach in which an "external check" can be defined for each remote site (or portion thereof) which initiates data retrieval from the remote site (that's why I call it synchronous).

And then you can have a hybrid approach.

-------------------
Jayesh
Mikoomi - enterprise monitoring made virtual
(www.mikoomi.com)

Thanks for the quick replies. And yes, Kaseya does that magic. You don't need tunneling, you can install Kaseya agents on multiple Windows machines in your customers network and talk by just opening one port to the Kaseya server in our company's network and it's also encrypted. Kaseya also makes it possible to collect SNMP information with one of the agents from multiple devices. But what you can do with the SNMP information in the end is not realy what you would like too do

So, I'm realy searching for something Kaseya already has but isn't using it good enough. Installing an appliance/virtual machine is not realy what I'm looking for because that is something I can do with all of the other products. But I have to say at the moment and not looking at this collector solution, Zabbix is on top of my list.

Maybe someone got another idea?

[richlv]

just a quick note on zabbix proxies. a zabbix proxy is a single daemon which gathers information from all the zabbix agents, snmp devices... anything. then it transmits this data to the zabbix server, thus you only need single port (10051, iana registered) open on zabbix server and only connections from zabbix proxy to zabbix server must be allowed.

note that proxy also buffers the data in case server can not be contacted and transmits it once server or communication line is up again. by default it buffers data for one hour, but you can change that, of course.

[M.Arnoldussen]

just a quick note on zabbix proxies. a zabbix proxy is a single daemon which gathers information from all the zabbix agents, snmp devices... anything. then it transmits this data to the zabbix server, thus you only need single port (10051, iana registered) open on zabbix server and only connections from zabbix proxy to zabbix server must be allowed.

note that proxy also buffers the data in case server can not be contacted and transmits it once server or communication line is up again. by default it buffers data for one hour, but you can change that, of course.

Thanks for the update. That is indeed something that other applications do not have.

I'm doing a Multi-criteria decision analysis between Cacti, Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix and Zenoss. I will make two considerations in my research document. 1. What if tunneling is applied. 2. What if we used a server/appliance/vm on the customers side. Maybe, if I translate it to english, i will post it here... If someone has an another update for me on this matter, let me know. Thanks

[M.Arnoldussen]

just a quick note on zabbix proxies. a zabbix proxy is a single daemon which gathers information from all the zabbix agents, snmp devices... anything. then it transmits this data to the zabbix server, thus you only need single port (10051, iana registered) open on zabbix server and only connections from zabbix proxy to zabbix server must be allowed.

note that proxy also buffers the data in case server can not be contacted and transmits it once server or communication line is up again. by default it buffers data for one hour, but you can change that, of course.

Will the data be encrypted?

[richlv]

Will the data be encrypted?

no, for that you would have to set up a tunnel, ssh port forwarding or another solution separately

[BenP]

Hi there,

IMHO the best solution will be a proxy or remote poller in customer site wich connect to your own site through vpn. It's easy to deploy and you'll gain a good security with a minimal impact.

If you can't make that just have a look on stunnel project. It aim to encrypt any deamon tcp datagrams.

Solution with remote working pollers are : zabbix, centreon, zenoss (the only ones I tried). Cacti is a really good grapher but for supervision it lack of major features.

Regards

[M.Arnoldussen]

Another Question

You can configure trend days but what does it do? Can it create trend reports? Because I don't see an option for it.

In this topic someone created nice reports with a trendline...

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5524

This is still possible? And how?

I'm using 1.8.1 and the only option I see for history data without a trendline is Monitoring > Graphs and change the timeline...

[alixen]

Hi,

You can configure trend days but what does it do? Can it create trend reports? Because I don't see an option for it.

In this topic someone created nice reports with a trendline...

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5524

This is still possible? And how?

I'm using 1.8.1 and the only option I see for history data without a trendline is Monitoring > Graphs and change the timeline...

You don't have to select anything.
Zabbix will automatically select history or trend data depending on time period.

If in "nice reports with a trendline" you refer to yellow envelope around avg data, just select "all" instead of "avg" when you define an item in a graph.

Regards,
Alixen

[ribbon]

I hope that you have the problem fixed and I really have to say that the best alternative is zabbix because I have switched to it recently and it does wonders for the company now. Besides it is very easy on the usage and it does a pretty good job altogether.