Been working on an enhancement to a current Nagios monitoring system by adding Check_MK to the mix. Its quite interesting to see how easy it is to add multiple remote monitoring hosts to a central control host using the OMD’s built in distributed monitoring. In fact its really a case of – installing the OMD package on a server (in this case ubuntu) and using the commands
omd create sitename
omd start sitename
to start working with the distribution via the web interface. To enable the remote monitoring – you actually need to stop the omd site with
omd stop sitename
and then
omd config sitename
to change the distributed option to on through the menu that this command presents. You can also set the default “page” or interface that OMD provides through config as well.
omd start sitename is used to start the OMD instance with the new settings and then the server address can be added to the multisite.mk file on the main host and then restart check_mk with check_mk -R to see the new site as part of the main check_mk installation.
Only one oddity in the omd distro though – its does not have the check_mk agent installed so you will have to add that and add the config details to the xinetd.conf file to allow it to be checked for services etc that can be monitored. More about that in another article