I hope I’m posting in the right place. I don’t have Nagios installed or anything yet (though I have played around with it in the past), as first I want to know if it’s possible to do the following:
[list]There are a number of client sites around town, all of which has existing Windows servers[/list:u]
[list]We’re currently looking for a way to monitor the network at each site, and report on any failures, etc[/list:u]
[list]We would like to have a server at our location that would receive the events, and software installed on the existing Windows Servers in the client locations that would report back to our server. We don’t want to add another server in each location.[/list:u]
[list]Because all of these clients are different companies, having Nagios monitor the network over a VPN link is not an option[/list:u]
Does anyone know if it’s possible to set up a service on a Windows Server that would monitor the internal network (like Nagios does), and then send that information (either through an SNMP Trap or otherwise) out through the internet to the Server at our office running Nagios (or any other Network Monitoring tool)?
Effectively Nagios on our server would be the “Master Monitor,” and would receive information from an Agent on the inside network at each client site.
never heard of nagios running on windows… IF IT IS POSSIBLE you may install some sort of VM on the server and run nagios on linux in a VM and then use passive checks (shivers go down my back for saying this… ), but i think it’s worse than creating some sort of VPN or buying some cheap of the shelf PC and install linux on that and place it at the customers location.
Thanks for your reply. Sorry about the delay from my end, I’ve been extremely busy.
I’ve found this article http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html that explains distributed monitoring by having a full install of Nagios at your main site, and then a barebones install of Nagios running on a box in each remote site.
I’ve been thinking about different ways for this to work, one of which is the Virtual Machine idea (I actually have that somewhat setup). The other idea I had was if the remote sites only require a barebones install of Nagios so that they just send their information back to the main site, then that install of Nagios would probably be able to run off an old desktop (as the main site continually checks to see if the remote sites are sending back data anyway). I haven’t explored this option yet, however my boss is opposed to both ideas. He doesn’t want to install a VM at each site, and he also doesn’t want to put another box at each site (even if it is just an old desktop).
What he was looking for is a way to use what’s already existing at each site (Windows installs), to collect the information. Do you know if there’s anyway to harvest the information gathered by the SNMP Trap Service on WIndows to send that information back?
The reason why a VPN is not an option is because all of the remote locations are different companies.
AFAIK it’s not possible through windows servers, but possibly somebody comes up with a solution… (but i wouldn’t set expectations too high)
Possibly some other system can do it, thinking of tivoli or the HP solutions, but licensing would most probably be WAY more than the cost of an old desktop
thinking of it i’d rather take the extra desktop solution anyway, just to avoid messing around with customer servers which would generate way more problems (even when it’s not your fault )
I would also prefer the old desktop solution in this case, as like you said, it’s not good to go messing with servers that are already configured.
The only other solution I’m looking into is setting up Remote Monitoring with OpenNMS. I haven’t found much documentation on it however, but from what I read (briefly) I think there may be a java client that you can install on a Windows server to monitor SNMP Traps and send that information back to the main server.
), but i think it’s worse than creating some sort of VPN or buying some cheap of the shelf PC and install linux on that and place it at the customers location.
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