I attended the conference for the third time and as always the weather in Bolzano in conjunction with a nice conference made for a great time. I have already mentioned my experiences with the hotel in a previous post so here I will focus mainly on the conference itself and my trip.
2.5 points by Sheraton in Bolzano
Now Four Points by Sheraton is what it was actually called and the aim of the hotel chain is to be a bit more stylish than regular four star hotels. Another way to call it is I guess a budget version of Sheraton. This means I know I cannot expect a Sheraton class hotel but I still think I can expect more than what I got from Four Points by Sheraton in Bolzano. Something I would have expect staying at a cheep three star hotel in terms of overall quality and customer service.
Trip to China: Vietnam [2/4]
Might sounds like a strange title since Vietnam is by no means a part of China but we decided to take a vacation from our vacation and head over to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. The first part of this trip has already been chronicled in the first trip report: Trip to China: Dong Xing, Part 1 and later parts will be published in a bit.
Trip to China: Dong Xing, Part 1 [1/4]
This will be a rather lengthy post about my travels in China. I was planning to blog regularly whilst in China but the internet situation made that difficult (also I was on vacation and being lazy). This first edition is about the first week or so we spent in DongXing before heading down into Vietnam and onward to Shenzhen which will come in the later editions.
Scripting on the Windows side
The biggest reason for Nagios success is the ability to extend it with custom scripts which makes it one of the most powerful monitoring systems. Now Nagios is not the only place where you can extend your monitoring! NSClient++ provides many ways to extend it with scripts and since I have gotten many questions about how to use scripts with NSClient++ lately I have decided to write this tutorial to help sort out the concepts.
Book review: Oracle ADF Enterprise Application Development—Made Simple
The best PACKT book ever?
Now don’t get excited!
This is not saying much; most PACKT books are so bad I want to gauge my eyes out with a fork!
And indeed this book is no exception it has many flaws and I honestly think is a bad book which suffers from lack of editing and peer review.
But is is a very very smart book and the author has managed to pull something rather difficult off in very nice way. I think with some editing this would have made a truly amazing book.
Putting some client into NSClient
NSClient++ despite its name is most often used in server mode responding to remote calls via either NRPE or check_nt. The closest thing to a client we get in normal mode of operation is NSCA where we submit data back. But NSClient++ can act as a client as well which is not just something I use for unit testing but something which can actually be useful in your monitoring environment.
A good example of a really useful feature is creating a proxy or use NSClient++ as proxies to add intelligence (see my post earlier on writing stateful scripts Enhance your monitoring with stateful scripts).
Securing NRPE with certificate based authentication
NRPE is a common easy to use option for monitoring remote machines from Nagios or Icinga. Unfortunately NRPE, with out of the box setup, is not what I would consider secure.
This tutorial looks at how you can secure your NRPE traffic by using NSClient++ both as a client and server (yes it runs on Linux as well) in conjunction with SSL certificates to provide certificate based authentication.
Real-time log file monitoring (both event log and text files)
Time for yet another tutorial this time detailing how to monitoring log files both event log and regular text files. The event log parts will build a bit on the earlier posts on monitoring the event log but since the “event log cache” feature has been replaced by the generic SimpleCache in 0.4.1 as well as 0.4.1 introducing a new SimpleFileWriter module as well I felt it was time to re-visit this topic.
Enhance your monitoring with stateful scripts
Stateful scripts are a simple yet powerfully way to enhance your monitoring which I think is used far to little. Using stateful script you can easily add simple predictions and change management. This is very easy to accomplished using NSClient++ as its built-in scripting modules by default provides stateful scripts (in contrast to Nagios and Icinga which tends to be stateless). This tutorial will walk you through writing a simple stateful script in Lua. If you are still confused about stateful scripts the main benefit is that they remember things. Thus you can alert when something changes as well as predict the future. A good example of this is disk growth prediction but there are a lot of other scenarios where they are useful.