Archive for the 'Plugins' Category

Monitor the End of the World (or any other event of your choosing) with Nagios XI!

Nagios XI is extremely flexible, perhaps more flexible than most people realize!

To showcase the flexibility of Nagios XI, President and Founder of Nagios – Ethan Galstad, has developed the plugin Doomsday Check  to monitor an arbitrary doomsday date (of your choosing) with customizable warning and critical thresholds.

Although this plugin may not be very practical in a networking environment, it’s fun to play around with and is definitely worth a try.

 

Service Status Detail

 

If you would like to use this plugin, simply download it here to your plugins directory (/usr/local/nagios/libexec/), make it executable (`chmod +x check_doomsday.php`), and create a service for it.

You can find more information on how to manage plugins in Nagios XI in this document. If you are an XI customer you may also watch this video.

If you are new to Nagios XI, you can test drive it free for 60 Days by downloading the trial.

Also, the Nagios World Conference is fast approaching! Register here today!

FREAK Vulnerability Tester

With yesterday’s disclosure of the new SSL/TLS vulnerability dubbed FREAK, we at Nagios decided to take some action to assist the community with a quick and easy tester to help determine if a server is vulnerable to (CVE-2015-0204).

If you are not familiar with the FREAK Vulnerability, here is a brief description from https://freakattack.com/ :

A connection is vulnerable if the server accepts RSA_EXPORT cipher suites and the client either offers an RSA_EXPORT suite or is using a version of OpenSSL that is vulnerable to CVE-2015-0204. Vulnerable clients include many Google and Apple devices (which use unpatched OpenSSL), a large number of embedded systems, and many other software products that use TLS behind the scenes without disabling the vulnerable cryptographic suites.

 

At Nagios, we take security vulnerabilities very seriously and when possible like to offer the ability to perform a quick check directly from our website.

Enter FREAK Vulnerability Tester (CVE-2015-0204)

FREAK Vulnerability Tester (CVE-2015-0204)

 

Nagios Enterprises provides IT management solutions that monitor your network infrastructure, manage your network bandwidth, and can mitigate or even eliminate the effects of the FREAK Vulnerability as well as other security vulnerabilities.

For most servers that are found to be vulnerable administrators should be able to update the OpenSSL package and then restart the affected services such as httpd.

If your server is running RHEL or CentOS, the following commands will resolve the security vulnerability:

yum update openssl -y
service httpd restart

If you are already using Nagios Core or XI to monitor your infrastructure, this easy-to-use plugin can notify you if your system is susceptible to the FREAK vulnerability.

Download the check_freak Plugin

If you haven’t experienced the benefits of monitoring with Nagios, be sure to check out our products page.

Monitoring Weblogic Metrics with Nagios XI

Weblogic is a popular Java-based application server that acts as a middleware between the application and the Java environment.  It provides a framework for developing traits such as reliability (recovering from failures), scalability (dynamic service scaling) and security (unified security system for apps).  Nagios XI has the ability to monitor various aspects of Weblogic using wlsagent as outlined in our document Monitoring WebLogic With Nagios XI. In this post I will expand upon some of those metrics, such as what they mean and why they are important.  Links to further reading will be provided where relevant.

Nagios XI Service Status Dashboard

Continue reading ‘Monitoring Weblogic Metrics with Nagios XI’

Monitoring Apache Cassandra Database Nodes with Nagios XI

As cloud services grow in popularity, so do the networks that provide those cloud services.  Few webserver-based distributed databases are as easy to install and configure as Apache Cassandra.  Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandra offers robust support for clusters spanning multiple data centers, with asynchronous master-less replication allowing low latency operations for all clients.

Cassandra relies on the Java platform, and as those of you who have tried to configure Java app monitoring most likely know, the experience can be painful.  There are a handful of plugins on the Nagios Exchange that attempt to simplify the configuration.  As these plugins rely on the Apache Cassandra utility “nodetool”, you either need to install Cassandra on the Nagios server (which is not suggested) or use an agent (like NRPE) to run the plugin script directly from the Cassandra server (which should have the nodetool utility).

The Cluster Node Check is designed to verify whether the number of live nodes is less than a specified number, and if so trigger a warning or critical alert within Nagios.

Continue reading ‘Monitoring Apache Cassandra Database Nodes with Nagios XI’