Introduction to Monitoring Tools for DevOps

Continuous
Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring is all about the ability of an organization to
detect, report, respond, contain and mitigate the attacks that occur, in
its infrastructure.

Type of
Monitoring
Depending on how complicated your monitoring needs are,
there are many different services available that can help you
monitor you applications at various levels.
Some of commonly used monitoring activities are.
• Real Time Monitoring - Perform real-time continuous
monitoring of business processes and data analytics. For
example Splunk.
• Application Performance Monitoring - To fully manage and
monitor the performance of an application. For Example
AppDynamics, Scout
• Infrastructure Monitoring – SolarWinds, Nagios, Zabbix
• Log Monitoring – SumoLogic, Splunk, ELK Stack

ELK Stack
• Popularly known as ELK Stack has been recently re-branded as
Elastic Stack. It is a powerful collection of three open source
tools: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana.
• These three different products are most commonly used
together for log analysis in different IT environments. Using ELK
Stack you can perform centralized logging which helps in
identifying the problems with the web servers or applications. It
lets you search through all the logs at a single place and identify
the issues spanning through multiple servers by correlating their
logs within a specific time frame.

Logstash
Logstash is the data collection pipeline tool. It the first
component of ELK Stack which collects data inputs and
feeds it to the Elasticsearch. It collects various types of
data from different sources, all at once and makes it
available immediately for further use.

Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a NoSQL database which is based on
Lucene search engine and is built with RESTful APIs that
uses JSON as the data exchange format. It is a highly
flexible and distributed search and analytics engine.
Also, it provides simple deployment, maximum reliability,
and easy management through horizontal scalability. It
provides advanced queries to perform detailed analysis
and stores all the data centrally for quick search of the
documents.

Kibana
Kibana is a data visualization tool. It is used for
visualizing the Elasticsearch documents and helps the
developers to have an immediate insight into it. Kibana
dashboard provides various interactive diagrams,
geospatial data, timelines, and graphs to visualize the
complex queries done using Elasticsearch. Using Kibana
you can create and save custom graphs according to your
specific needs.

ELK Configuration…
All these three tools are based on JVM and before start installing them,
please verify that JDK has been properly configured.
Check that standard JDK 1.8 installation, JAVA_HOME and PATH set up is already done.
Elasticsearch
•Download latest version of Elasticsearch from this download page and unzip it any folder.
•Run binelasticsearch.bat from command prompt.
•By default, it would start at http://localhost:9200

ELK Configuration…
Kibana
•Download the latest distribution from download page and unzip into any folder.
•Open config/kibana.yml in an editor and set elasticsearch.url to point at your Elasticsearch
instance.
In our case as we will use the local instance just uncomment elasticsearch.url:
"http://localhost:9200"
•Run binkibana.bat from command prompt.
•Once started successfully, Kibana will start on default port 5601 and Kibana UI will be available
at http://localhost:5601
Logstash
•Download the latest distribution from download page and unzip into any folder.
•Create one file logstash.conf as per configuration instructions.
We will again come to this point during actual demo time for exact configuration.
Now run bin/logstash -f logstash.conf to start logstash

What is Nagios?
• Nagios is used for Continuous
monitoring of systems,
applications, services, and
business processes etc in a DevOps
culture. In the event of a failure,
Nagios can alert technical staff of
the problem, allowing them to
begin remediation processes
before outages affect business
processes, end-users, or customers.
With Nagios, you don’t have to
explain why an unseen
infrastructure outage affect your
organization’s bottom line.

Nagios Architecture
•Nagios is built on a server/agents architecture.
•Usually, on a network, a Nagios server is running on a host, and Plugins interact with local and all the remote
hosts that need to be monitored.
•These plugins will send information to the Scheduler, which displays that in a GUI.

Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE)
•The check_nrpe plugin,
resides on the local monitoring
machine.
•The NRPE daemon, runs on
the remote Linux/Unix
machine.
•There is a SSL (Secure Socket
Layer) connection between
monitoring host and remote
host as shown in the diagram
above.

Nagios configuration files
• The main configuration file is “nagios.cfg” in etc
• cfg_file=contactgroups.cfg
• cfg_file=contacts.cfg
• cfg_file=dependencies.cfg
• cfg_file=escalations.cfg
• cfg_file=hostgroups.cfg
• cfg_file=hosts.cfg
• cfg_file=services.cfg
• cfg_file=timeperiods.cfg
• These are much like #include statements, allowing you to structure
your files.

Hosts.cfg
define host{
use generic-host ; Name of host template
host_name server1 ; name of computer
alias server1.localdomain ; canonical name
address 10.0.0.1 ; ip address
check_command check-host-alive ; defined in commands.cfg
max_check_attempts 10 ; used when check fails
notification_interval 60 ; how long between notification events
notification_period 24x7 ; defined in timeperiods.cfg
notification_options d,u,r ;
}

Services.cfg
define service{
use generic-service ; template
host_name server1 ; defined in hosts.cfg
service_description PING ;
is_volatile 0
check_period 24x7
max_check_attempts 3
normal_check_interval 5
retry_check_interval 1
contact_groups peoplewhocare ;defined in contactgroups
notification_interval 60
notification_period 24x7
notification_options c,r
check_command check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
}

Introduction to Monitoring Tools for DevOps

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