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OSN Service Monitoring Bundle: Service Notification
This Service Notification solution uses Nagios, a host, network and service monitoring tool designed to alert administrators about network problems before clients and end-users know that a problem exists. The monitoring process runs intermittently, checking specified hosts and services using external programs (plug-ins). When a problem is encountered, the tool can take necessary actions — such as running event handlers or sending notifications, including real-time notifications to administrative contacts — in a variety of different ways (http, email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.
Because if a host or device on the network goes down, most offered services offered will also fail, and if a host becomes unreachable, monitoring the services associated with that host is not possible, Nagios attempts to check for these types of scenarios when there are problems with a service. When a service check results in a non-OK status level, Nagios will attempt to confirm that the host running that service is "alive". Typically this is done by pinging the host to test for a response. If the host check returns a non-OK state, Nagios assumes there is a problem and automatically silences all potential alerts for services running on the host and notifies the appropriate contacts that the host is down or unreachable. If the host check command returns an OK state, Nagios will send an alert that the service may be a problem. In addition to identifying what hosts are causing problems, the outages CGI will also indicate the number of hosts and services being affected by a particular problem host.
Features and Benefits
Feature |
Benefit |
Description |
Extended monitoring capabilities |
Flexibility and standards-based |
Nagios contains multiple monitors that include network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.) and host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.) |
Hierarchy and mapping views |
Fast problem detection |
Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and unreachable |
Secured web interface |
Secure and easy to use |
Web interface for viewing current network status, notification, problem history and log files, etc.; simple authorization schemes can restrict users’ viewing and taking action using the web interface |
Service degradation notification |
Reduced operating expenses |
Contact notification when service or host problems occur and are resolved (via email, pager or other user-defined method); optional escalation of host and service notification to different contact groups |
True consolidated service representation |
Improved efficiency in service optimization |
Retention of host and service status across program restarts; scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages |
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