Monitoring the Health of Your Penguin? 45
codepunk asks; "I work for a large manufacturing firm in the midwest, working on a migration from Windows to Linux in the data center. We just completed installation of two full Oracle RAC 9i clusters. We are also in the process of configuring two clusters for our manufacturing floor's Linux desktop roll out. The machines that make up our data center are all Compaq Proliant Series machines. In order to facilitate hardware maintenance we are in bad need of a monitoring solution. HP offers Insight Manager as well as the Compaq Health Agents. This solution
would seem like a natural but the drivers installed by these solutions are binary only. We have never managed to get these to work correctly and are really concerned about the stability of our systems with these modules loaded. We are not opposed to buying hardware in the future from a vendor that provides a more open solution. We are also not opposed to buying a open third party solution. Slashdot, what do you use for Linux system hardware monitoring?"
Loggerithim (Score:4, Informative)
BB is really good (Score:4, Informative)
You beat me to it. (Score:2)
Re:You beat me to it. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:BB is really good (Score:2, Insightful)
We use BB where I work. It monitors health of over 100 servers and does a pretty good job of it.
You didn't mention how deep you want monitoring to go. Do you want to monitor the state of any individual files or processes?
Anything you can monitor via perl/shell scripts can be reported by BB.
Also (Score:4, Interesting)
its open source and extesible to fit any of your needs.
I'm the main developer.
Re:Wow - not at all flamebait (Score:2, Interesting)
Load levelling/failover such as your speaking of in Windows Datacenter is definitely possible in linux. Please visit http://linux-ha.org/ if you're interested in learning more about some of those types of applications.
I'm not sure what your point is with hardware. Quality hardware is available from many vendors, including hardware which supports Linux. Yes, IBM, Sun, etc have systems which provide good hardware redundancy and replaceability, but so does Dell.
Your point about comparing a load leveled Windows Datacenter cluster to a beowulf cluster is comparing apples to oranges. The Windows Datacenter is a cluster of machines providing redundancy of service for each other, the beowulf is a cluster of machines acting as a single large processing unit. Completely different balls of wax.
I guarantee you that I could build with Linux and Dell a cluster that would be just as reliable as your windows datacenter, plus it would cost less and probably perform better.
Feel free to visit again. Careful though, I hear there's heretics around who don't religiously praise ANY hardware or ANY software at all!
Yet Another (Score:4, Informative)
Making up funny headlines for articles is hard. (Score:4, Funny)
Moaning Goat (Score:3, Interesting)
Binary-only monitoring. (Score:3, Insightful)
AMI Megaraid adapters on HP have a monitoring daemon that sometimes bogs down under SCO as well.
I don't know how their Linux versions perform, if they exist, but Compaq's tools for SCO have been hit and miss.
The best of the lot IMHO is Compaq's SCSI monitoring, which is really nothing more than regurgitating of the firmware-based logs, which is where all that stuff belongs anyway.
but... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:but... (Score:2)
When in doubt, point at google [google.com] and show the parent what a hater you can be.
We all win!
read! (Score:2)
Re:read! (Score:1, Flamebait)
I have no idea why anyone would post a link to freeware PHP projects to display pretty graphs of SNMP data when the question was about Linux Kernel Modules to monitor Firmware.
Probably because there are hundreds of shitty free linux web tools to display pretty graphs of your network performance, and nearly zero linux tools for hardware monitoring. That should tell you something about the type of projects linux is currently being used for, and the type of projects you should use linux for.
I'm not saying that linux doesn't have a niche, and that it fills that niche very well. But outside that, it starts to fall down. True high-availability, single-point-of-failure servers like the original poster is using is one of those places where linux falls, unfortunately.
Nagios (Score:1)
Compaq hardware monitoring (Score:5, Informative)
Just to clarify for other readers, he's asking about the Compaq health and wellness drivers which are binary only kernel modules and daemons that monitor things like the power supplies, temperature, if the case was opened, the speed and health of every fan in the system as well as things like memory errors and the state of the hard drives. They provide information that things like Nagios and Big Brother won't be aware of because the information isn't in /proc without these drivers.
That being said, you'd do well to subscribe to the Compaq and Linux mailing list [van-dijk.net]. There are some solutions to getting those Compaq drivers working with versions of Red Hat that are newer than what Compaq supports. I haven't had the time to try any of the suggestions out on one of our servers yet.
Also, since everyone else is thinking you want application monitoring, I'd recommend Nagios [nagios.org].
Re:Compaq hardware monitoring (Score:3, Informative)
What really needed here is for Compaq to open the specs on their health monitoring interface. This is what limits me from running Gentoo on my Sun SPARCs as well; I need to know the temps and fans are all ok.
Coincidence! Here's what I've found... (Score:5, Informative)
There are a variety of agents and monitoring tools that make up the Insight Management toolset. We've found that some of the tools are better than others.
Pretty much the only *essential* tool that's required is the cpqhealth drivers and daemons. This poll the health of the onboard systems such as fans, CPUs, disk arrays, etc, and will log to syslog when there is a fault. Unforunately, the open source lm_sensors and cpqarrayd packages don't talk to the hardware in the new G3 DL380's, so cpqhealth is your only option. You can find it on HP's support site, as part of the hpasm package for Linux... I grabbed my copy for RedHat 7.3 from here [hp.com].
cpqhealth comes with pre-built modules for RedHat 7.3, 8.0 and a few other distros (SuSE for example). But I've found that even the most up to date stuff from HP's site only supports the kernels shipped on the RedHat cd, and nothing newer. Luckily, cpqhealth (part of the hpasm package) does allow you to build new modules. You'll need a compiler on the machine. Take a peek at this script: /opt/compaq/cpqhealth/custom_cpqhealth.sh - it will build a new cpqhealth RPM for you, containing the drivers and daemons necessary to log hardware faults to the syslog (as well as to take action on them).
The script will break when you first run it - it will look for the following two files:
Both of which are missing in the most recent hpasm release. Create the S10cpqasm file yourself (it's just a startup script that gets dumped /etc/init.d - a simple touch of that file is fine for now - you can put a proper one together later), and copy hpuid from /bin (where it gets installed when you installed the hpasm RPM).
Once done, you'll have an RPM that installs the following:
two kernel modules: cpqasm.o, cpqevt.o
two daemons: /opt/compaq/cpqhealth/cpqasm/casmd
/opt/compaq/cpqhealth/cpqevt/cevtd
Make sure the kernel modules and daemons get loaded, and you'll now get warnings when a fan fails, disk in the RAID array dies, etc.
Even better - unlike the rest of the HP/Compaq Insight stuff, this doesn't use SNMP, doesn't install a web server that listens to 0.0.0.0, and seems to work quite well.
Other annoying things I've discovered about the rest of the HP/Compaq toolset:
In the end, we just ended up installing cpqhealth on the boxes to warn us of hardware problems, and will use RRDtool [ee-staff.ethz.ch] for our other monitoring requirements.
Re:Coincidence! Here's what I've found... (Score:2)
My colleague has almost given up trying to make the compaq agents work on his RH 7.2 DL 360 G2 servers.
I think he's gotten to the point of loading some of the drivers but still getting some device not found errors when loading the modules.
BMC and Candle (Score:2, Informative)
BMC have a good few Linux server mananagement stuff. BMC Patrol [bmc.com] is one of them.
And so do Candle: Omegamon XE for Linux [candle.com]
Big Blue (Score:4, Informative)
The SNMP traps (or Tivoli TEC events in our case) are alot more intuitive and useful than the crap that insight manager sent out, and the agent seems to be more reliable. You can use a "Director Server" or a product like Nagios or OpenView for alerting.
Keep in mind that "Systems Management" in the pc/unix world is a black hole that consumes time & money. You might be better off using something like VMware GSX server on big Intel hardware or even an IBM zseries and use virtual hosts.
One of the advantages of big, expensive hardware is that they often come with service processors that phone home or page you when problems occur. At our shop, several admins have been suprised when an IBM repairman calls to schedule replacement of a failed disk or fan that they were unaware of -- the service call was generated automatically.
Insight (Score:2)
RMON, SNMP, perl, and an extensible system (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source Hardware Monitoring (Score:3, Informative)
You face a similar problem to pretty much any hardware specific driver issue when it comes to Linux: the O/S tends to be ignored by the vendor.
Open-source tools tend to be (gasp) based on open protocols, whereas hardware tends to have its own specific, closed methods for determining state (such as temperature, etc.). The only real way to solve the problem is to reverse engineer the available methods or patronize those vendors that offer either an open solution or wider selection of supported O/S's. I believe that Compaq embeds some code from BMC Software for monitoring low level hardware information, so it is doubtful you will ever see the source for it.
Off the top of my head, only Dell's OpenManage is available for Linux.
If you can find a way to access the information from the command line, you can always use net-snmp to integrate it into an SNMP agent that can be accessed by most management products.
Good luck, and if you get it working you may want to check out OpenNMS [opennms.org] as your monitoring solution. It supports CIM out of the box (as well as Dell OpenManage).
big brother / SNIPS / mrtg / NUT (Score:1, Informative)
http://monitor.aphroland.org/
(best viewed in 1600x1200 or higher)
instant network/system status from my home network. plenty of performance monitoring stuff, availability tracking etc. Works wonderfully. Took forever to setup though, most of that was determining what to monitor and how to monitor it, these days I can set it up in a few hours.
I also use PureSecure(www.demarc.com) for NIDS and HIDS. That data isn't available at the above url though some of my snort activity is.
please don't slashdot it as it puts a somewhat
heavy load on my system
I hacked up a couple of the tools(SNIPS/NUT) to display much more compact information so it would all fit in 1 page. with the exception of nut, all of the 3 other tools are individually accessable from
Re:Penguin health... (Score:2)
InterMapper (Score:3, Informative)
OSDN whoring time (Score:1, Informative)
# Topic
Bow down before OSDN! Huzzah!
HP SmartStart CDs now Linux based (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow, back to what I noticed: The old SmartStart CDs were Windows based (yup, bootable Windows, or a subset thereof, on a CD). The SmartStart CDs that shipped with my new DL380 G3s are *Linux* based. They boot into a web browser from which all system config is managed. CTRL-ALT-F1 gets you a bash prompt. X is running on F3. Window manager is icewm. Browser is phoenix. PHP seems to be present as well, as there is a
cat
Very interesting, as this Linux-based tool helps people install Windows on their servers. For fun, I asked it to walk me through an OS install - it noticed that I had configured my OS in the BIOS as Linux (yes, there is a BIOS Linux-specific option), it told me that it couldn't assist a Linux install, only Windows.
Re:HP SmartStart CDs now Linux based (Score:2)
Re:HP SmartStart CDs now Linux based (Score:1)
Of course! If you are trying to install Windows, you MUST be in dire need of assistance!
Compaq RILO Boards and mozilla (Score:2)
Mon and Nagios (Score:2, Insightful)
Nagios [nagios.org] seems to be good as well, although I haven't used it myself.
Volution (Score:2, Informative)
Is that even rational? (Score:2)
I have found that having a few spares on hand, being able to swap out machines quickly, and having a good backup and mirroring strategy has always been the best insurance. Beyond that, I don't want to be bothered by little aches and pains from a computer until it breaks.
Zabbix (Score:1, Informative)
Crystal Darksite (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, it's a single-board computer that sits in a PCI slot in your server, and monitors its vitals (hardware / software). It runs completely independently of your server, except for an optional OS agent that can monitor things like memory utilization, CPU activity, etc. (Yes, there is an agent available for Linux).
It has a web-based administration interface, and can send you alerts and warnings via Email or pager, even if the main server locks up hard for some reason--in that case, you can perform a remote reset or even cycle the power, all from a web based interface.
It's a pretty nifty card--you should take a look.
Re:Crystal Darksite (Score:2)
I wonder if it comes with source. If I am not mistaken it does not measure raid drive status so it is probably not a silver bullet either.
Hardware Monitoring (Score:1)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=672