Redhat monitoring tool

You can configure Prometheus as a backend for Grafana, and it has a lot of capability to receive and retrieve data from endpoints. Prometheus also provides a very robust way to query the data it stores, outside of using a visualization tool like Grafana.

Its PromQL query language allows you to build your own queries live and save them to find patterns or issues before they become serious problems. Once you're collecting data and can make sense of it using some handy graphs, the next step on your journey should be setting up something to help alert you when conditions warrant attention. Tools like Alertmanager as part of Prometheus can bridge the gap between "I can see my infrastructure" and "I know when there's a problem without having to take the time to look through graphs, stats, or messages.

At the end of the day, there's no one-size-fits-all answer for how to begin or improve infrastructure monitoring and observability. Your best bet is to test tools like SmokePing, Cacti, Grafana, Prometheus, and Alertmanager to see how they fit into your environment.

It also might make more sense to run multiple tools for different use cases, depending on your environment. Lifelong nerd, storage enthusiast, automation fiend, infrastructure lover, security paranoid, open source advocate, telecom twerp, coach, teacher, and goofball. More about me. Relive our April event with demos, keynotes, and technical sessions from experts, all available on demand. Enable Sysadmin.

Keeping tabs on your infrastructure's health can be the difference between reacting to problems and preventing issues before they get out of hand. Download now. Check out these related articles on Enable Sysadmin Image. An introduction to Prometheus metrics and performance monitoring.

Use Prometheus to gather metrics into usable, actionable entries, giving you the data you need to manage alerts and performance information in your environment. Posted: November 23, Author: Jason Frisvold. Introduction to Linux monitoring and alerting.

Have you ever wanted to set up a process monitor that alerts you when it's offline without spending thousands of budget dollars to do so?

The first two versions 1 and 2c provide for simple authentication using a community string. This string is a shared secret between the agent and any client utilities.

The string is passed in clear text over the network however and is not considered secure. Version 3 of the SNMP protocol supports user authentication and message encryption using a variety of protocols.

The format of the directives is as follows:. For example, the following directive provides read-only access to the system tree to a client using the community string "redhat" on the local machine:.

To test the configuration, use the snmpwalk command with the -v and -c options. To configure an SNMP version 3 user , use the net-snmp-create-v3-user command. Note that the net-snmp-create-v3-user command may only be run when the agent is not running. The following example creates the "admin" user with the password "redhatsnmp":. The noauth option allows you to permit unauthenticated requests, and the priv option enforces the use of encryption.

The authpriv option specifies that requests must be authenticated and replies should be encrypted. For example, the following line grants the user "admin" read-write access to the entire tree:. To test the configuration, create a. The snmpwalk command will now use these authentication settings when querying the agent:. In addition, the agent can be queried for a listing of the installed RPM packages on the system, a listing of currently running processes on the system, or the network configuration of the system.

It assumes that the net-snmp-utils package is installed and that the user is granted access to the SNMP tree as described in Section Contains general system information such as uptime, number of users, and number of running processes. The systemStats OID provides a number of counters around processor usage:. The latter provides much more granular data.

The Interfaces MIB provides information on network devices. IF-MIB::ifTable provides an SNMP table with an entry for each interface on the system, the configuration of the interface, and various packet counters for the interface. The following example shows the first few columns of ifTable on a system with two physical network interfaces:. The following SNMP queries will retrieve network traffic for each of the interfaces on this system:.

This allows for capacity planning as well as performance issue troubleshooting. For example, it may be helpful to know that an email system had a 5-minute load average of 15 while being tested, but it is more helpful to know that the email system has a load average of 15 while processing 80, messages a second. When application metrics are available via the same interface as the system metrics, this also allows for the visualization of the impact of different load scenarios on system performance for example, each additional 10, messages increases the load average linearly until , There are several ways to extend the agent for custom applications as well.

This section describes extending the agent with shell scripts and the Perl plug-ins from the Optional channel. It assumes that the net-snmp-utils and net-snmp-perl packages are installed, and that the user is granted access to the SNMP tree as described in Section The example below demonstrates this mechanism with a script which determines the number of httpd processes in the process table.

See the snmpd. The exit code of the following shell script is the number of httpd processes running on the system at a given point in time:. The format of the extend directive is the following:. To expose multiple metrics as integers, supply different arguments to the script using the extend directive.

For example, the following shell script can be used to determine the number of processes matching an arbitrary string, and will also output a text string giving the number of processes:.

Integer exit codes are limited to a range of 0— For values that are likely to exceed , either use the standard output of the script which will be typed as a string or a different method of extending the agent. This last example shows a query for the free memory of the system and the number of httpd processes. This query could be used during a performance test to determine the impact of the number of processes on memory pressure:.

Executing shell scripts using the extend directive is a fairly limited method for exposing custom application metrics over SNMP. If you decide to install packages from these channels, follow the steps documented in the article called How to access Optional and Supplementary channels, and -devel packages using Red Hat Subscription Manager RHSM? No arguments are necessary to create an embedded agent:. The agent object has a register method which is used to register a callback function with a particular OID.

The register function takes a name, OID, and pointer to the callback function. The OID. For instance:. You can also use the ps command in a combination with grep to see if a particular process is running. For example, to determine if Emacs is running, type:.

For a complete list of available command-line options, see the ps 1 manual page. Using the top Command. The top command displays a real-time list of processes that are running on the system. It also displays additional information about the system uptime, current CPU and memory usage, or total number of running processes, and allows you to perform actions such as sorting the list or killing a process. To run the top command, type the following at a shell prompt:.

Table It can provide more detailed information about processes than top , but is not dynamic. For detailed information about using ps , refer to its man page: man ps. Although it is not dynamic like top , you can specify a sampling interval, which lets you observe system activity in near-real time.

For detailed information about using vmstat , refer to its man page: man vmstat. The default output covers today's CPU utilization at ten minute intervals from the beginning of the day:.

This tool is a useful alternative to attempting to create periodic reports on system activity through top or similar tools.