Managing Probes; Establishing Thresholds - Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.1.1 Reference Manual

Chapter 7. Monitoring

7.5.1. Managing Probes

To add a probe to a system, the system must be entitled to Monitoring. Further, you must have access
to the system itself, either as the system's root user, through the System Group Administrator role, or
as the Satellite Administrator. Then:
1. Log into the RHN website as either an Satellite Administrator or the System Group Administrator for
the system.
2. Navigate to the System Details
3. On the System Probe Creation page, complete all required fields. First, select the Probe
Command Group. This alters the list of available probes and other fields and requirements. Refer
Appendix C, Probes
to
probes require the Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon to be installed on the client system.
4. Select the desired Probe Command and the Monitoring Scout, typically RHN Monitoring
Satellite but possibly an RHN Proxy Server. Enter a brief but unique description for the probe.
5. Select the Probe Notifications checkbox to receive notifications when the probe changes state.
Use the Probe Check Interval dropdown menu to determine how often notifications should
be sent. Selecting 1 minute (and the Probe Notification checkbox) means you will receive
notifications every minute the probe surpasses its CRITICAL or WARNING thresholds. Refer to
Section 7.4, "Notifications"
messages.
6. Use the RHNMD User and RHNMD Port fields, if they appear, to force the probe to communicate
via sshd, rather than the Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon. Refer to
SSH"
for details. Otherwise, accept the default values of nocpulse and 4545, respectively.
7. If the Timeout field appears, review the default value and adjust to meet your needs. Most but not
all timeouts result in an UNKNOWN state. If the probe's metrics are time-based, ensure the timeout
is not less than the time allotted to thresholds. Otherwise, the metrics serve no purpose, as the
probe will time out before any thresholds are crossed.
8. Use the remaining fields to establish the probe's alert thresholds, if applicable. These CRITICAL
and WARNING values determine at what point the probe has changed state. Refer to

"Establishing Thresholds"

9. When finished, click Create Probe. Remember, you must commit your Monitoring configuration
change on the Scout Config Push page for this to take effect.
To delete a probe, navigate to its Current State page (by clicking the name of the probe from the
System Details Probes tab), and click delete probe. Finally, confirm the deletion.
7.5.2. Establishing Thresholds
Many of the probes offered by RHN contain alert thresholds that, when crossed, indicate a change
in state for the probe. For instance, the Linux::CPU Usage probe allows you to set CRITICAL and
WARNING thresholds for the percent of CPU used. If the monitored system reports 75 percent of its
CPU used, and the WARNING threshold is set to 70 percent, the probe will go into a WARNING state.
Some probes offer a multitude of such thresholds.
In order to get the most out of your Monitoring entitlement and avoid false notifications, Red Hat
recommends running your probes without notifications for a time to establish baseline performance
158
Probes tab and click create new probe.
for the complete list of probes by command group. Remember that some
to find out how to create notification methods and acknowledge their
for best practices regarding these thresholds.
Section 7.2.3, "Configuring
Section 7.5.2,