Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 - CHANNEL MANAGEMENT, Reference Manual

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Chapter 8.
157
Monitoring
The Red Hat Network Monitoring entitlement allows you to perform a whole host of actions designed
to keep your systems running properly and efficiently. With it, you can keep close watch on system
resources, network services, databases, and both standard and custom applications.
Monitoring provides both real-time and historical state-change information, as well as specific metric
data. You are not only notified of failures immediately and warned of performance degradation before
it becomes critical, but you are also given the information necessary to conduct capacity planning and
event correlation. For instance, the results of a probe recording CPU usage across systems would
prove invaluable in balancing loads on those systems.
Monitoring entails establishing notification methods, installing probes on systems, regularly reviewing
the status of all probes, and generating reports displaying historical data for a system or service.
This chapter seeks to identify common tasks associated with the Monitoring entitlement. Remember,
virtually all changes affecting your Monitoring infrastructure must be finalized by updating your
configuration, through the
Scout Config Push
page.
8.1. Prerequisites
Before attempting to implement RHN Monitoring within your infrastructure, ensure you have all of the
necessary tools in place. At a minimum, you need:
• Monitoring entitlements — These entitlements are required for all systems that are to be monitored.
Monitoring is supported only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.
• RHN Satellite with Monitoring — Monitoring systems must be connected to a Satellite with a base
operating system of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or later. Refer to the
RHN Satellite Installation Guide within
Help
for installation instructions.
• Monitoring Administrator — This role must be granted to users installing probes, creating notification
methods, or altering the monitoring infrastructure in any way. (Remember, the Satellite Administrator
automatically inherits the abilities of all other roles within an organization and can therefore conduct
these tasks.). Assign this role through the
User Details
page for the user.
• Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon — This daemon, along with the SSH key for the scout, is
required on systems that are monitored in order for the internal process monitors to be executed.
You may, however, be able to run these probes using the systems' existing SSH daemon (
sshd
).
Refer to
Section 8.2, “Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (
rhnmd
)”
for installation instructions and
a quick list of probes requiring this secure connection. Refer to
Appendix D, Probes
for the complete
list of available probes.
8.2. Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (
rhnmd
)
To get the most out of your Monitoring entitlement, Red Hat suggests installing the Red Hat Network
Monitoring Daemon on your client systems. Based upon
OpenSSH
,
rhnmd
enables the RHN Satellite
to communicate securely with the client system to access internal processes and retrieve probe status.
Please note that the Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon requires that monitored systems allow
connections on port 4545. You may avoid opening this port and installing the daemon altogether by
using
sshd
instead. Refer to
Section 8.2.3, “Configuring SSH”
for details.