Monitoring; Prerequisites - Red Hat NETWORK 4.0 Reference Manual

Monitoring

The Red Hat Network Monitoring entitlement allows you to perform a whole host of ac-
tions 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 spe-
cific metric data. You are not only notified of failures immediately and warned of per-
formance 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 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 infras-
tructure must be finalized by updating 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 that are to be
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monitored. Monitoring is supported only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.
RHN Satellite Server with Monitoring — Monitoring systems must be connected to a
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Satellite with a base operating system of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 Update 5,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4, or later. 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, creat-
•
ing notification methods, or altering the monitoring infrastructure in any way. (Remem-
ber, 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, along with the SSH
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key for the scout, is required on systems that are monitored in order for
Chapter 7.