Nagios in an Enterprise Environment

If you are looking for a network monitoring solution using Nagios or Nagios XI to monitor a very large number of hosts, I am talking more than 5000 hosts, it is possible to design them using Nagios or Nagios XI (hereinafter known as Nagios).

There are several critical points you need to take into consideration. Two very important points, this will either make your design flawless in terms of performance or give you a headache no medicine can cure!

Point 1: Hardware specification - Take into consideration CPU, RAM, IO of HDD, the higher the better (SSD even better)

Point 2: Frequency of check, how data is handled (queuing and writing)

The solution we designed writes over 1,000,000 records per day on a MySQL database (yes the DB needs to be tweaked for performance! and regularly checked for potential issues).

We designed a complete new dashboard from ground up. This dashboard displays only alerts, has the following action points:

1. Able to assign alerts to agents
2. Able to assign alerts to level 1, 2 & 3 engineers
3. Assign ticket ID to alerts
4. View hosts related information (asset information; like location, purchased date, warranty information, support engineers to call, etc)

The main interface was also design from ground up. This interface allows users to add hosts and select pre-defined templates for that particular hosts. We created over 100 templates, ranging from a switch, routers, firewall, load balancer's, multiple OS's, oracle, DB2, *SQL,and many more.

This is the high-level design that catered for this requirement.

Have a good week ahead!

Replacing Cisco with beatiful and sexy Asterisk IPPBX ;-)

Well folks, yet another humble milestone for us.

We were trying very hard to penetrate this organization to implement our NMS - Network  Monitoring Solution Nagios and Asterisk IPPBX/ Call Centre solution based on Asternic. We had faced multiple phases, yes phases of challenges. The main hurdle, it's a Cisco power house. No doubt they carry a Cisco smile on their faces, they were moving towards a downhill trend with cost savings.

Now they face a new challenge, they need to expand, add new sites, more users, greater demand for features and functionality are being requested from management and users, and they have no where else to turn to, they are stuck, without a choice!

That all came to past when they met us. We showed them how we can work with their budget and then save some! We talked about how we can have the following features on Asterisk to project a seamless cross over from the OLD and EXPENSIVE TELEPHONY solution:

1. Voice (for sure :-))
2. Integration via E1/ PRI to existing legacy PBX
3. Integration via SIP to a voice gateway
4. Integration via Skinny protocol to CCM
5. IM/ Presence
6. Call Billing
7. Call Centre Solution
8. Call Recording/ Voice Logger
9. Customization on the IP Phones to enable XML integration with 3rd party application (cool eh?)
10. And the sweetest thing, help phase out the existing dinosaur

 The above is just a stepping stone for them. There are many other back-end applications/ 3rd party applications that needs to be integrated with Asterisk.

So stay tuned. I will be updating more and more and more!

 

A new chapter for Enterprise Infrastructure and Network Monitoring with Nagios

We made Nagios look sexy and cool. With over 4000 hosts to monitor, ranging from switches, routers, firewalls, load balancer to monitoring ISDN link status, RTA, IPSLA, performing backup and restore of configuration files, databases, various flavors of OS's from Windows, Linux, AIX, SUN OS.

Our customer requested for a unique management interface, where a GUI is created with static pre-defined templates with host specific information and service checks, a customized dashboard, extra functionality and a detailed reporting engine that can produce reports such as multiple host and a selection of services in a single report, multiple hosts and multiple services.

It took us around 4 months to get this up and running. Now Nagios is live and running as smooth as a road runner .. Beep Beep!







Here is a sample of the dashboard and management interface that was developed in-house.. cool eh!

Yet another interesting day with Asterisk

I just sent out a proposal on Asterisk for a customer that requires a mobility solution for their internal users. What does this Cisco glorified definition mean? Simply this, a communication solution that allows users on mobile phones with SIP clients to connect back to their office IPPBX using either 3G or wireless internet (WIFI) connection.

This is quite interesting, as the solution design needs to take in, consideration of security, now no one wants to place an IPPBX out there without any protection, just imagine how many port scanners are running out there! We put in a routing server behind a firewall, which does SIP routing for authenticated phones.

With this solution, imagine the cost savings to and from international locations.

Happy selling Asterisk folks...

PS: Pretty soon, I will be writing something really cool about Nagios, what we have developed and where we plan to take it!