Every administrator I've worked with dreams of a master console that can dutifully watch over his or her environment—performing helpful tasks such as checking for unusual events, logging performance and response time, and providing metrics for availability and resource utilization. Although Windows contains basic tools that perform some monitoring functions, many sites turn to comprehensive application suites that provide extensive monitoring capabilities, such as HP OpenView, Micromuse's Netcool, and NetIQ's AppManager. Unfortunately, such packages often have a hefty price tag, leaving many administrators to make do with whatever tools they can find.
What if I told you there's an open-source solution that does many of these things, and more? What if I told you that in addition to letting you monitor resource utilization and service availability, emailing alarms, and generating reports, the tool doesn't require a third-party agent to be installed on the devices you want to monitor, nor does it require a network logon? Such a product exists, and you can have it—for free—today.
Meet JFFNMS, the Just For Fun Network Monitoring System, an open-source network-monitoring project developed by Javier Szyszlican and Craig Small. You can download JFFNMS at SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net) or at the application's homepage at http://www.jffnms.org. Don't let the whimsical title fool you; this open-source software offers enterprise-class capabilities. Many thanks to Javier and Craig for providing this wonderful tool.
How can JFFNMS perform its magic without requiring a third-party agent on the target device or without logging on to the device itself to check the status of resources and services? It does all this through SNMP, which is included in Windows NT and later. You must install SNMP on the system you'll use for monitoring before you install JFFNMS. I provide background information about SNMP and the steps for configuring it on your system in the Web-exclusive sidebars "SNMP: The Foundation for JFFNMS," http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 44988, and "Setting Up SNMP," http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 44989. Now let's walk through setting up JFFNMS on your system.
Installing JFFNMS
Unlike the Windows versions of some open-source packages, JFFNMS doesn't use the familiar wizard-style installation. By completing the JFFNMS installation, you'll graduate to "Open Source 201"—but have no fear: The instructions that Javier and Craig provide for installing JFFNMS on Windows are generally right on target. Along with JFFNMS, you'll be installing Apache HTTP Server (so remove Microsoft IIS if you've already installed it), the PHP scripting language, MySQL, Round Robin Database Tool (RRDtool), and NMapWin, all of which are required to support JFFNMS. A complete walkthrough for each of these protocols and services is provided in the JFFNMS installation package and also at http://www.jffnms.org/jffnms/INSTALL.win32.txt (this URL is case-sensitive).
Go to the JFFNMS Web site and download the most recent stable package for installation—at publication time, the most recent stable package was 0.7.9. Set aside some time to install JFFNMS without distractions. Follow the installation instructions to the letter, and you should get JFFNMS up and running on the first try. I completed my first installation in less than 30 minutes. The only real glitch I encountered (a minor one) was when I discovered that I had to assign local Administrator privileges to the JFFNMS account I'd created on my monitoring system. Until I did so, the implementation didn't work quite right.
After JFFNMS is installed, you should be able to browse to your local server at the console itself by using the URL http://yourserver/admin/setup.php, where yourserver is either localhost (if you're accessing JFFNMS from the machine it's installed on) or the name or IP address of the system on which you installed it. The default username and password are both admin. As outlined in the installation instructions, you'll need to provide a few configuration details, and you should ignore the red warnings for the diff, neato, smsclient, PgSQL, and SOAP components. Save the configuration after you've made the required changes. Now you're ready to start using JFFNMS.
Setting Up Monitoring
Before we set up monitoring, you should understand how JFFNMS uses the term "interface." For most people, an interface might be a NIC or perhaps a device's IP address. In JFFNMS, an interface is any parameter that the software should monitor, such as hard-disk utilization, whether an application is running, or whether a particular port is available on a host. Essentially, an interface is how JFFNMS sees the world.
Log on to JFFNMS by browsing to the main page for the system at http://yourserver and entering the default username and password. You should see the JFFNMS Start Page, a high-level count of various metrics within JFFNMS. Because JFFNMS doesn't know about any devices on your network yet, the first thing you'll want to do is define a host for JFFNMS to start looking at. Click the Administration link at top right of the Web page. An additional line should appear below the link, which displays several items that you can administer. Click the Users and Customers link, and another line appears below it. Click the Customers link, which displays the main Customer configuration screen.
Here, you define a customer by clicking the Add link. The primary reason for performing this step is that every host and interface should be assigned to a customer—otherwise JFFNMS will create alerts for that host or interface to tell you that it isn't properly assigned. These alerts cause a bit of noise in the event views for JFFNMS, so make sure you've got at least one customer name here to use.
After you've defined a customer, you should also define some zones for JFFNMS before you define hosts to be monitored. Zones are simply a means for logically grouping devices—perhaps by floors in your building if your devices are all at one location or by offices if your devices are spread across multiple locations. Select the Hosts and Interface link in the second line of the Administration menu, which should still be in your browser window, then select Zones. Define new zones by clicking the Add link and entering the appropriate zone names.
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AH_employee February 05, 2005 (Article Rating: