Monitoring your unRAID remotely - LCDProc, LCD, Slimserver, Nagios, Email, Beeps

For those interested in Nagios, let me add that SNMPc is so much better.

 

Nagios will send you a message when something goes down & then continually send messages every 5 minutes until it comes back up. SNMPc will send you one message when something goes down & one message when that something comes back up. May not seem like a big deal, but if you have the alerts going to your phone (email or text) & are away somewhere (a meeting, a dinner, out of town) & your phone goes off every five minutes... Not fun getting all those alerts or deleting them later with Nagios.

 

Isn't the alerting repeat configurable configurable?  As is the ability to configure service dependencies, so that if it stops responding to ping you don't get network service alerts?

 

It is possible this is now an option. I have not used Nagios in several years. Was a huge annoyance to the IT team where I worked about 5 years years ago.

Frequency of Nagios notifications is COMPLETELY configurable - as is everything about nagios.  The only valid criticism of nagios is that the learning curve TO DO THINGS RIGHT is pretty steep.  Part of the problem is that it is very easy to get nagios to "just work", but it takes a lot of planning and thinking about how to get nagios to perform exactly as you'd like it to.

For example, for most "issues", I have nagios inform me ONCE when it happens - as long as it's within reasonable hours.  If the issue is not resolved, I'll get a reminder email ONCE every 24hrs (again, within reasonable hours - i.e. not when I'm trying to sleep).  If I've ignored reminder emails for 3 consecutive days, the issue is escalated (i.e. someone else gets the email).

Also, the service dependancy construction is very important - i.e. if 10 different monitored devices are connected to a single ethernet switch, I get ONE notification if the switch is down - not 11 notifications that all connected devices AND the switch is down.

Nagios is vastly powerful and configurable - but it needs a substantial intellectual investment up front.