Mark's blog

One of my favourite interview questions I used to ask candidates was a variation of "Desert Island Discs" : Imagine you are going off to be a sysadmin on a desert island, with no internet access, and further imagine that the previous sysadmin was a total fascist with a minimalist install policy. We're talking a bare-bones "classic" Solaris installation, or a minimal Debian system here. You've got SSH installed, but not much else. Before you hop on the boat, however, you are given a couple of hours high-speed internet access and a USB stick. You can take up to 5 tools with you to this desert island: What do you pick ?

It was always an interesting question to ask, because it gave you an insight into the kind of sysadmin tasks someone had been doing before, and it also served as a nice, relaxed "ice breaker" type question. For my money, aside from some tools like rsync and screen which I couldn't live without, a decent monitoring package would have to be top of my priorities. There are a bunch out there: some of them free; some of them commercial, but the one that would make it on to my USB stick would have to be Nagios.

It's open source, extremely well documented and widely implemented, and there are a ton of useful add-ons and plugins available for it. The only draw backs I can find with it are it's ugly web interface, the complexity involved in setting up a new system for monitoring, and the disjoint between availability and performance monitoring. If you have money to throw at a problem, then software like Uptime or Hyperic neatly deal with all of these issues, but they can be quite pricey if you have a large number of systems to manage and a tight budget.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I first discovered Centreon. It's essentially a monitoring platform that uses Nagios at it's core. You could think of it as a fancy frontend to "stock" Nagios, but it's so much more than that: besides the attractive interface, it also bridges the gap between availability and performance monitoring, and makes Nagios administration a snap. Due to the reliance on Nagios though, I'd go so far as to say that before you experiment with Centreon, you really should have set up "stock" Nagios, and be familiar with the plugin architecture, NRPE and how alerts / escalations are managed. Ideally, you should have a stock Nagios installation you can use to duplicate on Centreon/Nagios.


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