As you know i have install nagios as my monitoring tools to me nagios was one of the finest availability and monitoring solutions available. The stability, extendability and cost effectiveness (it is free under the GPL). And it is far from being the easiest monitoring solution to implement. The build process itself, while not being overly complicated you must have to manualy set the nagios configuration to add a new host and etc that is why i was looking for projects that aim to ease both the installation and configuration of Nagios and my selection goes to Groundwork.

GroundWork Monitor is an open source IT monitoring solution that enables you to maintain network visibility and control. It’s extensible and can integrate with leading proprietary third-party tools, including help desk, configuration management databases (CMDBs), management consoles and monitoring tools. This is a single server deployment that leverages the strengths of 15 other open source projects such as Nagios, rrdtool and nmap. It combines the results of these projects in to a system that evaluates the status, events and performance of monitored devices and presents these results in an easy to understand web application.  There were 3 version of groundwork :

• GroundWork Monitor Enterprise
• GroundWork Monitor Professional
• GroundWork Monitor Community Edition

The Community, Professional and Enterprise versions include monitoring for servers, devices, applications and performance, the Community product is designed to monitor less than 100 devices, while the Professional and Enterprise version can keep tabs on hundreds of devices and is commercially supported. We will use The Community Edition.

The Community Edition has the following features

• Easy to install wizard to help optimize the monitoring performance.
• Availability monitoring to alert if devices are up or not.
• Ability to monitor servers, devices and applications which gives you the flexibility to monitor all of the integral components within your network.
• Performance monitoring to give insight on latency before a server is offline
• Basic auto-discovery and configuration tools to help identify additional devices on the network which is a great time-saving function if your network is constantly changing.
• Built on the same open-architecture as GroundWork Monitor Professional and Enterprise, Community Edition is easy to integrate and customize.

What is Cacti ?

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, RRD stands for Round Robin Database, which is a system to store and display time-series data such as network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, and server load average. Cacti leverages the features of RRDtool and stores the data it collects in Round Robin archives. It stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.

On this tutorial we will install GroundWork Monitor Community Edition on CentOS 5.2 and integrate it with cacti

System Requirements

1. Make sure you’ve installed the following packages on your CentOS installation before continuing.

• Apache
• Perl-DBI
• Java JDK Update 6
• MySQL Community Editionor normal MySQl but do not forget to install MySQL-client

2. I assume you have installed Apache and we will install Perl-DBI using RPM, you need to download it first

cd tmp wget ftp://archive.groundworkopensource.com/pub/pre-req-community-edition/perl-DBI-1.40-5.i386.rpm

After downloading, enter the following command to install :

 rpm -ivh perl-DBI-1.40-5.i386.rpm

Now we installed the Java JDK Update 6:

1. Download the JAVA JDK

wget ftp://archive.groundworkopensource.com/pub/pre-req-community-edition/jdk...

2.  Un-tar package with the command:

tar xvfz jdk-1_5_0_06-linux-i586-rpm.bin.tar.gz 

3.   Change the permissions to execute:

chmod +x jdk-1_5_0_06-linux-i586-rpm.bin 

4.  Execute the binary file to extract/install the RPM file with the command:

./jdk-1_5_0_06-linux-i586-rpm.bin 

You will be prompted to accept the license.

All files will be put into: /usr/java

Now we download the MySQL Community Edition on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#linux-rhel5-x86-32bit-rpms

• Download Server

wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/MySQL-server-community-5.0....

• Shared libraries

wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/MySQL-shared-community-5.0....

• Shared Compatibility Libraries,

wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/MySQL-devel-community-5.0.6...

• Client ( use this version ySQL-client-community-5.0.51a-0.rhel5
  you can download it on ftp://mirror.switch.ch/pool/1/mirror/mysql/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/MySQL-cli… , the MySQL-server-community-5.0.67 did not detect MySQL-client 5.0.67-0 dependecies)

wget ftp://mirror.switch.ch/pool/1/mirror/mysql/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/MySQL-client-community-5.0.51a-0.rhel5.i386.rpm

• After downloading, enter the following command to install all of the MySQL files: rpm -ivh MySQL*

Install GroundWork Monitor

Before start the installation you need to set the host first on etc/hosts/

vi /etc/hosts

add this

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain
192.168.1.117 Groundwork Groundwork.Server

you can changes 192.168.1..117 to be your own server ip address

1.  Download the groundwork community for CentOS 5

wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gwmos/groundwork- ce-5.2.1-52.rhel5.i386.tar.gz

2.  Uncompress the Groundwork CentOS 5 packet

tar -xzvf groundwork-ce-5.2.1-52.rhel5.i386.tar.gz

3. go to groundwork-installer-5.2.1/ folder and start the installation

./run_install.sh

you will get prompted with some question and ask about your mysql password

Ground work are installed now you can go to your server address Go to the URL: http://<hostaddress>/, you can login using user/password : admin/admin for your first login

you can see the nagios localhost  stats in there

How to configure the ground work

Offcourse you wanted to add a new host and on groundwork you can easily do that, just go to configuration -> host wizard  fill  out this Host Vitals details and click next

then pick the parents for your new host on  Host Properties 1 and click next, you cannot pick your own hostname as your parents you must pick another one or it will be error

and pick Hostgroups on  Host Properties 2 pages

and you can add another services and after you finish you can save it as new profiles

okay you have create a new host beside the localhost now you just need to activate it and you can do it by picking control option on the top list and you can test it by click the  Pre flight test then if there is no error you can click Commit to activate your settings

Now you can see the new host nagios monitor under localhost on monitoring server option click View Service Status Detail For All Hosts to see all host

Next time youw anted to add new host with the same services you can just clone the old host and add the new host ip address.  Okay , now we will install Cacti and integrate it to our Groundwork

Before we installed cacti please makesure you have install snmp, you can install it by using yum.

yum install php-snmp net-snmp net-snmp-utils rrdtool

then don’t foget to start snmp

service snmp start

1. Download cacti, extract it and copy it to groundwork htdocs directory

cd /tmp
wget wget http://www.cacti.net/downloads/cacti-0.8.7b.tar.gz
tar -zxvf cacti-0.8.7b.tar.gz
mv cacti-0.8.7b cacti
cp -R cacti /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/

2. Create the MySQL database for Cacti

mysqladmin -u root -p create cacti

then enter the mysql root password to create it

Import the default cacti database to our mysql, you need to go to cacti folder first on  /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/cacti

cd /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/cacti
mysql -u root -p cacti < cacti.sql
Enter password:

Optional: Create a MySQL username and password for Cacti. If you’ve added a mysql passwd, you’ll need to login with that.

mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';
mysql> flush privileges;

Edit Cacti Config in /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/cacti/include/config.php and specify the MySQL user, password and database for your Cacti configuration.

$database_default = "cacti";
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cactiuser";
$database_password = "somepassword";

Add the cacti poller to your /etc/crontab file

crontab -e

*/5 * * * * root /usr/local/groundwork/bin/php /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Add cacti directory to the /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/conf/httpd.conf file

vi /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

<Directory "/usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/cacti">
   AuthType Basic
   require valid-user
   TKTAuthLoginURL   http://127.0.0.1/monitor/index.php
   TKTAuthCookieName   cacti_auth_tkt
   TKTAuthTimeout 0
</Directory>

Then Restart Apache

Service httpd restart

Go to cacti admin site to start the installation  http://<server>/cacti/install  ,  you will found some component was not found warning

you need to modify it

/usr/local/groundwork/bin/snmpwalk
/usr/local/groundwork/bin/snmpget
/usr/local/groundwork/bin/snmpbulkwalk
/usr/local/groundwork/bin/snmpgetnext
/usr/local/groundwork/bin/rrdtool
/usr/local/groundwork/bin/php

Now you can login to cacti with default username/password admin/admin and set the cacti config

go to Settings -> General Tab:
Select RRDTool Version: 1.2

and go to Settings -> Paths to verify the paths then Add fonts path:

go to Settings -> Authentication (since we are using SSO. If you don’t want SSO, leave this checked.)

Uncheck ‘UseCacti’s Builtin Auth’

Now since the cacti was installed we need to add cacti to groundwork using wrappit

go to General Tab and add this :

Name: Cacti
Desc: Cacti
Base URL: /cacti
Welcome:

go to SSO menu

go to Export

#Install Package

Now we need add view to admin
# Administration -> Roles -> Administrators

Cacti should be one of the options in the drop-down menu now.