Pandora FMS : The Free Monitoring System (v1.3)
===============================================
http://pandora.sourceforge.net
What is Pandora FMS
-------------------
Pandora watches your systems and applications, and allows you to know the status of any element
of those systems. Pandora could detect a network interface down, a defacement in your website,
a memory leak in one of your server app, or the movement of any value of the NASDAQ new
technology market. If you want, Pandora could send out SMS message when your systems fails...
or when Google's value drop below US$ 33.
Pandora will adjust, like an octopus, to your systems and requirements, because has been
designed to be open, modular, multiplattform and easy to customize and use, all integrated into
a scalable and distributed architecture.
Pandora runs on any operating system, with specific agents for each platform gathering data and
sending it to a server, it has specific agents for GNU/Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, BSD/IPSO,
and Windows 2000, XP and 2003.
Pandora can also monitor any kind of TCP/IP service, without the need to install agents, and
monitor network systems such as load balancers, routers, switches, operating systems,
applications, or simply printers if you need. Pandora also supports SNMP for collecting data
and for receiving traps.
A few examples of common resources monitored by Pandora could be processor load, disk and
memory usage, running processes, log files, environmental factors such as temperature, or
application values like strings contained in web pages or any possible way to collect data in
an automatic way.
Pandora FMS Features
--------------------
* Lightweigth agents. No need to install adicional software.
* Also could use network to collect data on remote systems.
* High availability for each component.
* Escalable architecture: no liminitation on number of servers you can setup for the same enviroment.
* Internal detection on Network Servers in case of failure, automatic takeover of secondary servers.
* Stores all data for many weeks or months
* Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers.
* Data is stored in a relational database (MySQL).
* Automatic database optimization for size, using interpolation and compression algorithms.
* Integrated alert systems: send mails, execute scripts, send SMS, or simply write to syslog are a few examples.
* Integrated graphical reporting system for any kind of collected data.
* SNMP Trap reception with Realtime Console.
* Granularity of accesses and user profiles for each group and each user.
* Integrated internal auditing for any operation.
* Alert filtering to avoid false positives.
* Event system with user validation for operation in teams.
* Integrated incident system with flows and different profiles.
* Any collected value can be displayed as graph or data table.
* Alerts can be triggered any kind of event, in many ways.
* WebConsole on line HTML contextual help.
* Integrated DB management: purge and DB compaction.
* Mass configuration/alert manager to copy and distribute agent-module and/or agents/alerts setup to other agents.
* Profiles could be personalized using up to eight security attributes without limitation on groups or profiles.
* Filters for collected data to avoid bad data.
Install
-------
Please visit our online documentation site or download install guides at
http://pandora.sourceforge.net.
Quick Install Guide for Pandora FMS UNIX AGENTS 1.3
---------------------------------------------------
Installing Pandora FMS Agent for unix
Untar agent tarball, for example at /tmp/pandora_agent
As root, execute command line installer:
./pandora_agent_installer --install
This should install your agent, setup permissions and place files in their respective locations:
root@blackbox01:/tmp/pandora/pandora_agents/linux# ./pandora_agent_installer --install
Pandora FMS Agent Installer 1.0 (c) 2007 Sancho Lerena
This program is licensed under GPL2 Terms. http://pandora.sourceforge.net
Checking default dir /usr/share/pandora_agent...
Checking Pandora FMS Agent on /usr/bin/pandora_agent....
Creating Pandora FMS Agent home directory at /usr/share/pandora_agent ...
.
.
Creating logfile at /var/log/pandora_agent.log...
Copying Pandora FMS Agent to /usr/bin/pandora_agent...
You have your startup script ready at /etc/init.d/pandora_agent_daemon
First you need to copy your public SSH keys (/home/slerena/.ssh/id_dsa)
under /home/pandora/.ssh/authorized_keys on your Pandora FMS Server host
You also need to setup your /etc/pandora/pandora_agent.conf config file
Setup SSH authentication
Due that Pandora FMS agent connect by SSH you need to setup SSH keys now. You also can use FTP method by
using .netrc file, but it's much more secure and better to use SFTP with SSH2).
Probably you want to run Pandora FMS agent under root privileges to grab system data. It's possible that you
don't need to run as root to collect data you need, in that case, procedure are the same, but using another
user.
Create ssh keys using DSA type for key:
ssh-keygen -t dsa
And reply as follows to questions (enter to all questiosn):
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/root/.ssh/id_dsa):
Created directory '/root/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:2d:68:30:f7:53:2d:7e
You need to add your PUBLIC key (/root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub) to /home/pandora/.ssh/authorized_keys file in each
Pandora FMS data server you want to use with this agent.
Login to Pandora FMS data server, and add the key on /home/pandora/.ssh/authorized_keys file. You could use
cut and paste, for example, or copying file with scp or ftp from one system to another. Take care of
carriage returns. Public key "appearance" is like as:
ssh-dss AAAAB3NzaC1kc3MAAACBAMR4WOOvuT3UyZPKC/NcqBuduB/H8oKF2LRv52LX88YNO
kgdIPNOat+NeweCuQdVOaDUNvFTgnyYV6iBtApstzUl6ndKALZlDoZnBYULYTUtBF+cdRHq7v
n0bufIMRHFpg8ZvqR3dBulz6bVQqJu8nqZGQDyLgPEmkQ6O9 root@blackbox01
The entire block MUST BE in a SINGLE LINE, if not, don't work. Also, /home/pandora/.ssh/ directory and
/home/pandora/.ssh/authorized_keys in server, should have "pandora" user ownership and permissions set to
700 for directory and 600 for authorized_keys file.
For example, if you have copied id_dsa.pub to /tmp in server system:
cat /tmp/id_dsa.pub >> /home/pandora/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 /home/pandora/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 700 /home/pandora/.ssh/
chown -R pandora /home/pandora/
Image:Warning.png Warning! Setting up SSH authentication is a mess due ANY step you missed, makes auth to
fails, so please don't skip nothing
Always test this connection to check that SSH authentication is working. From your agent system, where
Pandora FMS agent is running, try to contact Pandora FMS server:
ssh pandora@server_ip
First time a hostkey authentication changenge should show you something like:
The authenticity of host 'xxxxx (x.x.x.x)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 42:d4:a5:f2:a7:b8:1f:c3:d5:42:ab:c7:b5:5b:af:57.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?
Reply yes, and you should see the system prompt for user pandora, WITHOUT asking for password, because SSH
automatic authentication, based on DSA Keys, should work and resolve authentication. If not, try to review
previous steps. Note that if you're using scponly protection, shell don't be available, but authentication
will be correct.
If you have serious problems and get stuck, try to setup maximun verbosity of SSH Daemon on System running
Pandora FMS server:
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Replace LogLevel INFO for LogLevel DEBUG2
Restart ssh
/etc/init.d/ssh restart
Now you have MUCH MORE information about SSH problems. In debian this information is at /var/log/auth.log.
Dont forget to set again LogLevel INFO in your sshd_config and restart again SSH, or too much loggin will be
generated (and performance penalty).
Configure Pandora FMS agent
Your config file is at /etc/pandora/pandora_agent.conf, edit it and setup that variables:
* server_ip: put IP address of your Pandora FMS data server
* debug: set it to zero to not use debug mode.
Rest of parameters could be default values.
Check out some of the default modules to have an idea of your agent will do and what kind of information
will report to Pandora FMS data server. This could be modified in any time (restarting agent).
Run your Pandora FMS unix agent
First to need to create your agent in your Pandora FMS console as described in "new agent" procedure (but
you don't need to create network modules), only create an agent with the SAME name that have your system.
After creating agent in console, you could launch agent:
/etc/init.d/pandora_agent_daemon start
If you have problems, a good idea is restart Pandora FMS agent manually to check errors in startup:
pandora_agent /etc/pandora
License
-------
The project is distributed under the GPL License v2 or later.
Copyright (C) 2004-2007 Pandora FMS development team
9ddb5101be