Zenoss – Monitoring a Cisco Router & forwading Cisco and Linux syslog events

Overview

This screencast starts by showing you how to enable SNMP on a Cisco router (please note the configuration of other Cisco devices such as catalyst switches is slightly different). Then we look at getting all log messages forwarded through to Zenoss so they show up as Zenoss events. I then go back and setup forwarding of the /var/log/syslog to Zenoss on the Linux server we configured in the first Zenoss screencast.

(I ran over the youtube limit of 10 minutes with this video and so had to upload it to google video instead. As a result the quality isn’t quite as good. Sorry, won’t happen again)

Resources

Cisco configuration

en
conf t
hostname router1
int fa0/0
ip address 172.16.1.5 255.255.255.0

exit
snmp-server community public RO
snmp-server contact Joe Admin
snmp-server location Brisbane QLD Australia

logging 172.16.1.1
copy run start

Linux Configuration:

vim /etc/syslog.conf
(add the line: *.* @172.16.1.1)
update-rc.d sysklogd restart

References

• http://www.netcraftsmen.net/welcher/papers/snmprouter.html
• http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/cisco-hn/syslog-cisco.htm
• http://www.adventnet.com/products/webnms/syslog/help/syslog_fp/start_forward.html

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Zenoss – Adding a user and email alerts

This screencast shows you how to add a user and configure them to receive alerts for a specific class of devices (in our case any Linux server) via email. It also quickly shows performance data which the test server setup in the first Zenoss screencast has collected (after running for two hours).

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Zenoss – Installation & monitoring a server via SNMP

In this screencast I show you how to download and install the Zenoss server software, how to configure an Ubuntu Linux server to run SNMP and then how to add that SNMP enabled server to Zenoss for monitoring.

Hopefully someone with find this helpful to get them up and running quickly with Zenoss. Just as a precautionary note, I would probably advise against using SNMP (and certainly with my config file) if you’re monitoring servers over the internet, but on a secured LAN it should be fine.

Below is my snmpd.conf configuration file that I use which is pretty much straight out of the Zenoss manual.


## System location and contact information
syslocation Timbucktoo
syscontact Joe Admin

## sec.name source community
com2sec notConfigUser default public

## groupName securityModel securityName
group notConfigGroup v1 notConfigUser
group notConfigGroup v2c notConfigUser

## Make at least snmpwalk -v 1 localhost -c public system fast again.
## name incl/excl subtree mask(optional)
view systemview included .1

## group context sec.model sec.level prefix read write notif
access notConfigGroup "" any noauth exact systemview none none


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