Some kind of system monitoring software is essential in any system administrator’s toolkit. It allows us being alerted when (or before) problems occur, getting a general overview of the system’s health and also examining resource trends and historical records.
Being Nagios the “de facto” IT monitoring solution, it is well known both for its power and extensibility as well as for its notorious difficulty to setup and configure. The Open Monitoring Distribution (OMD) offers us a pre-packaged, fully working Nagios system which, built on top on Nagios and the Check_MK ecosystem, and together with many other standard Nagios plugins/extensions, makes the installation, setup and maintenance of a full monitoring solution a trivial task.
In this hands-on tutorial we will start from two bare CentOs virtual machines and carry out a step by step procedure which will take us from a zero configuration to a full monitoring system with email notifications, graphs, trends, etc. where one of the machines will become the Nagios/OMD server monitoring the status of both of them. This procedure, for which detailed notes will be provided, should allow us to set up, in a similar fashion, a full monitoring infrastructure for a regular sized (~10-100s of nodes) HPC cluster in a matter of hours.
