]po[ ITSM Nagios Integration

Nagios  is an enterprise-class systems monitoring solutions for hosts, services, and networks released under an Open Source license. Together the two systems cover the entire process chain of ITIL complient IT Services Management:

Creating the ticket:

• Incident detection - Nagios detects a malfunction
• Nagios integration - ]po[ receives the Nagios email and creates an incident ticket for the specified configuration item.

Working with the ticket:

• Incident management - ]po[ starts a workflow for the ticket, depending on the ticket type.
  The workflow includes information about where to queue the ticket and whether a customer sign-off is necessary or not.
• Problem management - IT staff can "escalates" the incident by creating a problem ticket, which in turn starts is own workflow and queue assignations.
• Configuration management - all tickets are associated with the affected configuration item, allowing users to track the incident history per CI. ]po[ can parse the Nagios configuration files (nagios.conf and the contents of the /objects/ folder in Nagios 2.0) in order to synchronize the Nagios CIs with the ]po[ CIs. Future versions of ]po[ will also be able to create Nagios configuration files.
  
• Knowledge management - all comments and other text related to tickets are stored in the ]po[ full-text search engine and accessible for users with access rights to the specific ticket.
  

Closing the ticket:

• A recovery mail from Nagios automatically closes the ticket.
• Alternatively, the CVS integration may close the ticket if a CVS or SVN commit includes a comment of type "fixed #123".
  

Integration with other modules:

• Timesheet management - ]po[ tickets are linked with the timesheet management, so that all participants can log hours against tickets
• Financial management - time and material spent on tickets are summed up a the SLA level and allow the organization to bill customers the provided services
  
• Release management - changes in CVS or SVN are automatically re
  

Nagios Integration Overview

The Nagios integration is based on the following components:

• A locally running Postfix instance receives emails (possibly imported via fetchmail) and delivers them to ~/Maildir/new/
• An OpenACS "acs-mail-lite" process scans ~/Maildir every few minutes
• ]po['s "intranet-nagios" package receives callbacks from acs-mail-lite, parses the Nagios subject line and extracts extract all important variables (host, service, status etc.):
• ]po[ check is there is already an open ticket for the specified host/service and add the current message to the existing ticket
• If necessary, ]po[ generates a new host and/or service as "Configuration Items" in the configuration database.
• Alternatively, ]po[ can also parse the Nagios configuration files and import all hosts and services into the ConfDB.

Nagios Configuration Setup

Please follow these steps in order to setup/debug your Nagios integration.

1. Nagios detects an incident and sends an email:
   Please configure your Nagios "contacts.cfg" to include "projop@localhost" for notifications (we assume that ]project-open[ is running as user "projop" at the same computer where Nagios is running).
   To verify: Please check /var/log/mail or /var/log/maillog to see if notification emails are sent out correctly.
   
   
2. Please configure Postfix SMTP agent to receive emailfon the computer running ]project-open[:
   Please configure the SMTP agent on the computer running ]po[ to deliver local mails in "Maildir" format. Please note that not all SMTP agents can deliver in "Maildir" format (Sendmail is a prominente example). In this case, please change to Postfix or QMail. You may have to use a mailbox and "fetchmail" if Nagios and ]po[ are running on different computers.
   To verify: Please check in /web/projop/Maildir/new/ that every Nagios mail creates a new file.
   
   
3. Configure "acs-mail-lite" to parse Nagios notifications:
   "acs-mail-lite" is an OpenACS/]po[ package that is capable of handing incoming mail and to distribute mail events to the "intranet-nagios" package. Please go to Admin -> Parameters and configure the "BounceMailDir" parameter of acs-mail-lite to match your Maildir ("/web/projop/Maildir"). Then go to Admin -> Interactive Shell and execute the command "acs_mail_lite::load_mails".
   To verify: Please check log file for debugging output: "tail -f ~/log/error.log | grep 'load_mail_dir'". You should see several lines, the last one of them like this:
   [<Date>][<ID>][-conn0-] Notice: acs_mail_lite::load_mail_dir: Calling: 'im_nagios_acs_mail_lite_callback -to projop@localhost -from nagios@projop.project-open.net -subject {...} -body {...}
   If you don't see this last line: Please make sure you have installed intranet-nagios >= 3.4.0.7.5 and the latest version of acs-mail-lite.
   
   
4. Check that intranet-nagios parses the Nagios alert:
   The procedure im_nagios_process_alert in ~/packages/intranet-nagios/tcl/intranet-nagios.procs.tcl  is responsible for parsing the Nagios messages and creating helpdesk tickets and configuration items. It is unlikely to cause trouble if the Nagios mails have been received correctly by acs-mail-lite.
   To verify: Please go to Helpdesk to check for new tickets, and go to Conf Items to check if a new server has been created plus a sub-item representing the Nagios service.
   
   

References

Maturity 

• Active and Stable
  

Related Tutorials

Related Object Types

Related Packages

Related Modules

• IT Services Management Module
• Service Management