Monitoring; Prerequisites; Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon ( Rhnmd ) - Red Hat NETWORK 3.7 Reference Manual

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 sys-
tem resources, network services, databases, and both standard and custom applications. (During the
Monitoring technology preview, Provisioning-entitled systems are treated as if they have Monitoring
entitlements.)
Monitoring provides both real-time and historical state-change information, as well as specific metric
data. You are not only notified of failures immediately and warned of performance degradation before
it becomes critical, but you are also given the information necessary to conduct capacity planning
and event correlation. For instance, the results of a probe recording CPU usage across systems would
prove invaluable in balancing loads on those systems.
Monitoring entails optionally establishing notification methods, installing probes on systems, regu-
larly reviewing the status of all probes, and generating reports displaying historical data for a system
or service. This chapter seeks to identify common tasks associated with the Monitoring entitlement.
Remember, virtually all changes affecting your Monitoring infrastructure must be finalized by updat-
ing your configuration, through the Scout Config Push page.

7.1. Prerequisites

Before attempting to implement RHN 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 to be monitored (and
•
are currently bundled with Provisioning entitlements). Monitoring is supported only on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux systems. Entitlements may be obtained through the Buy Now links on the RHN
website.
RHN Satellite Server with Monitoring — Monitoring systems must be connected to a Satellite with
•
a base operating system of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 Update 3 or later only. Refer to the RHN
Satellite Server Installation Guide within Help for installation instructions. Contact a Red Hat sales
representative to purchase Satellite.
Monitoring Administrator — This role must be granted to users installing probes, creating notifi-
•
cation methods, or altering the monitoring infrastructure in any way. (Remember, the Organization
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 is required on systems for probes moni-
•
toring internal processes to be executed. You may, however, be able to run these probes using the
systems' existing SSH daemon (
( ) for installation instructions and a quick list of probes requiring this secure connection.
rhnmd
Refer to Appendix C Probes for the complete list of available probes.
7.2. Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (
To get the most out of your Monitoring entitlement, Red Hat suggests installing the Red Hat Network
Monitoring Daemon on your client systems. Based upon OpenSSH,
Server to communicate securely with the client system to access internal processes and retrieve probe
status.
). Refer to Section 7.2 Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon
sshd
Chapter 7.

Monitoring

)
rhnmd
enables the RHN Satellite
rhnmd