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1.2. 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. It provides notifications of system failures and performance degradation before it becomes critical. It also provides information that assists in capacity planning and event correlation. For example, the results of a probe recording CPU usage across systems would assist in balancing loads on those systems.
There are two components to the monitoring system: the monitoring system and the monitoring scout. The monitoring system is installed in the Satellite and performs backend functions such as storing monitoring data and acting on it. The monitoring scout runs all the probes and collects monitoring data. The monitoring scout can be enabled to run on a Satellite or Red Hat Satellite Proxy system. Using monitoring scout on Proxy allows you to offload work from the Satellite, providing scalability for probes.
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 section 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.

1.2.1. Prerequisites

Before attempting to implement Red Hat Network 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 only supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.
  • Red Hat Satellite with monitoring - monitoring systems must be connected to a Satellite with a base operating system of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or later.
  • 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). See Section 1.2.2, “Configuring the Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (rhnmd)” for installation instructions and a quick list of probes requiring this secure connection. See Appendix A, Probes for the complete list of available probes.

Enabling Monitoring

Monitoring is disabled by default, and will need to be enabled before it can be used.
  1. Log in as a user with Satellite Administrator privileges and navigate to Admin → Red Hat Satellite Configuration. Click the Enable Monitoring checkbox, then click Update to save.
  2. Restart services to pick up the changes. Go to the restart tab to restart the Satellite. This will take the Satellite offline for a few minutes.
  3. Check if the Monitoring tab is available under Red Hat Satellite Configuration to confirm that monitoring is enabled.
  4. Navigate to Admin → Red Hat Satellite Configuration → Monitoring. Click the Enable Monitoring Scout checkbox to enable the scout. Click Update Config to save.

Note

It is recommended that you leave the monitoring configuration values as the default values. Sendmail needs to be configured to use notifications.