monitoring

Setting up Shinken on OMD

Whats Shinken

The home page for Shinken has the breakdown on what Shinken is, but as a summary, its a drop in replacement for the Nagios core engine re-written to be 100% compatible with your existing checks, monitors plugins etc using Python as its base. It provides a new WebUI for displaying service issues and supports greater scalability and service monitoring.

I’m very much a beginner, having only thus far installed and setup monitoring on a few hosts, but I hope to be able to integrate Shinken with Graphite, as well as some of my custom information radiators setup in the office.

How do I get it?

I’m using OMD here, which means its pretty simple to configure Shinken as an alternative check core to Nagios.

Known Issues

A bug in OMD that stops you from adding new hosts and applying changes from the check_mk UI. It appears that OMD thinks nagios.cfg exists even when using Shinken and so when applying those changes the system falls over. The workaround is to provide a nagios.cfg from the shinken configuration, as well as configure the check_submission system (I dont understand that bit though).

ln -s /omd/sites/<yoursite>/tmp/shinken/shinken-apache.cfg /omd/sites/<yoursite>/tmp/nagios/nagios.cfg
echo "check_submission = 'pipe'" >> /omd/sites/<yoursite>/etc/check_mk/main.mk

Swap Nagios out

Lets make a new site called “shishi” and swap out Nagios for Shinken

omd create shishi
omd config shishi set CORE shinken

Add Contact Group

To allow users to login to the Shinken Web UI, you need to configure a contact configuration for Nagios (odd but true) Enter the following block of configuration into /omd/sites//etc/nagios/conf.d/contact.cfg and restart your omd site

define contact {
  contact_name                  omdadmin
  alias                         omdadmin admin contact
  host_notification_commands    check-mk-dummy
  service_notification_commands   check-mk-dummy
  host_notification_options     n
  service_notification_options  n
  host_notification_period      24X7
  service_notification_period   24X7
}

define contactgroup {
  contactgroup_name             omdadmin
  alias                         omdadmin admin contact group
  members                       omdadmin
}

Enable MongoDB for Dashboard persistence

Next enable mongodb so Shinken can store its dashboard configuration. The port may need to be changed

omd config shishi set MONGODB on
omd config shishi set MONGODB-TCP_PORT 27018

Add some configuration to mongodb to shinkens module_webui.cfg - Lines 13 , 22-27

define module{
    module_name      WebUI
    module_type      webui
    host             0.0.0.0       ; mean all interfaces
    port             7767
    # CHANGE THIS VALUE!!!!!!!
    auth_secret      CHANGE_ME
    # Advanced options. Do not touch it if you don't
    # know what you are doing
    #http_backend    wsgiref
    # ; can be also : cherrypy, paste, tornado, twisted
    # ; or gevent
    modules          Apache_passwd,Mongodb
    # Modules for the WebUI.
}
define module{
    module_name      Apache_passwd
    module_type      passwd_webui
    # WARNING : put the full PATH for this value!
    passwd           /omd/sites/shishi/etc/htpasswd
}
define module{
  module_name Mongodb
  module_type mongodb
  uri mongodb://localhost:27018
  database shinken
}

Next Steps

Bring The Graphite

use_with_graphite

Reap the rewards

  • Learn more about what makes Shinken different to Nagios by experience
  • See if I can get better integration of Monitored events against continuous datasets
    • For example, I want to show when a Jenkins build occured on a build node as a vertical line on my CPU monitors for that node.

References

Alot of googling around was needed to bring these pieces together, here are the main sources of my “knowledge”