7. Network checks configuration

7.1. Configuration principles

(categories, etc...)

7.2. Command Line Interface

SANET installation for medium size networks ranges form around 5000 to 10000 targets to be periodically checked. The checks needs to be extremely customizable in order to satisfy users’ requests and in the meantime mechanisms to ease configuration and checks definition performed by operators should be provided.

Configuration is one of the hardest challenges in designing a monitoring system for medium and large size networks. Studying and designing the configuration mechanisms led to the definition of 3 main goals:

• to provide the ability to fine-grain define checks and parameters while avoiding to introduce complexity in configuration procedures.
• to provide the operators with familiar tools, similar to the ones used for network appliances configuration (i.e. Cisco IOS).
• to ease and automatize as possible the system management.

In SANET a node is directly related to targets, mesaures and interfaces, the latter being related to other targets and measures (see Network element structure ), configuration mechanisms then will have to provide both a way to define configuration parameters strictly related to the resources, and the insertion of targets and measures in the interface, as well as the insertion of targets, measures and interfaces in the nodes.

To meet these needs two main components have been realized:

• a Domain Specific Language (DSL) offering primitives for the checks definition and environment variables for resources information retrieval and setting.
• a classification defining hierarchies and inheritance between categories and instances. Each node, network interface, target or measure is an instance that inherits the parameters and the related resources from its parent category, inherited parameters might then be modified.

SANET configuration procedure starts from the import of provided category libraries then the definition of instances of interest for the network to be configured. It is preferrable to refer to nodes using DNS names rather than IP addresses for obvious reasons.

It is also possible to define new categories with related parameters of interest. In section Part 2: Configuring checks in your first GNU/Linux node a tutorial can be found describing how to configure the monitoring of a GNU/Linux server with checks related to node reachability, root file system space, cpu occupation, RAM and swap memory occupation, system reboot, cpu load and idle time. Values from each check are logged and the values are shown in a specific chart.

It is then possible to define a node belonging to server-linux category and add targets and measures related to a specific filesystem for the newly created node (see Adding targets and measures to node)

7.3. Importing and exporting the configuration

The SANET CLI provides some basic operations: show configuration and configuration terminal that allow to import or export system configuration via input/output redirections:

# #Configuration export
# echo "sh conf" | sanet-cli > /var/backups/sanet-config.`date +%Y%m%d`

# #Configuration import
# sanet-cli -c < /var/backups/sanet-config