MONITORING THE ENTERPRISE:EXAMPLES AND BEST PRACTICES

Cody Eding, Bill Halverson, Kevan HobbsCentral New Mexico Community College

WHY MONITOR?

• Proactive IT vs. Reactive IT• Metrics collection• Change justification• Increased internal/external customer satisfaction

WHAT DO WE CHOOSE?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_monitoring_systems

WHAT DO WE CHOOSE?

• Many shapes, sizes and costs• What are you planning to monitor?• Do I need collated historical data? • How much time? Money? Resources?

• Often inversely related

• One size fits all or multiple systems?• Be prepared for mediocrity and workarounds

MONITORING @ CNM

• Nagios XI• 240+ hosts and 1,700+ checks

• Home-grown scripts • vRealize – VMware• NetBrain - Network

TWO TYPES OF MONITORING

• State Monitoring• Where are we right now?

• CPU usage, memory usage, disk space, etc.

• Process Monitoring• Logical chain of steps to complete a task

• Student registration• Website content updates• Do I have an internet connection?

EXAMPLES• Monitor a Windows service with PowerShell Scheduled

TaskFunction Watch-ServiceStatus { Param( [string]$Name )

$From = "Service Status Notification <noreply@domain.com>" $To = "jsmith@domain.com" $SmtpServer = "mail.domain.com"

$ServiceStatus = ( Get-Service $Name ).Status

If ( $ServiceStatus -ne "Running" ) {Send-MailMessage -To $To -From $From -SmtpServer $SmtpServer \

-Subject "Warning: $Name service is not running" }}

Watch-ServiceStatus -Name Netlogon -Notify $true

EXAMPLES• Nagios Windows Host

EXAMPLES• Nagios Linux Service

EXAMPLES• Nagios Business Process

BEST PRACTICES

• Work with application owners to develop sane thresholds• Be prepared for thresholds to change

• Automation!• Configuring monitoring is a tedious task to complete by hand

• Configuration management• Create modular and reusable template systemswindows 2012r2 prod print-server

BEST PRACTICES CONTINUED

• Generate only actionable alerts• Avoid being “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and alert fatigue

• Be accountable to alerts• Digest raw data into something useable• We’re still working on this one!

THANK YOU!

• ceding@cnm.edu • whalverson@cnm.edu• khobbs@cnm.edu