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User Story
As a PRTG User, I want to better monitor my Unix servers with the addition of an SNMP sensor that makes use of the Host-Resources MIB to monitor running processes.
The new sensor would be lightweight, easy to use and not require any configuration on the monitored system (except the basic SNMP community configuration already present for all other SNMP-based monitoring)
Details of User Story
Right now, there are two solutions to monitor running processes on Unix (and Mac) servers, both inadequate:
- Either follow this KB that uses UCD-SNMP-MIB *but* requires the monitored-server's snmp agent file to be configured, which is not always possible especially in black-box VM appliances, *and* there is no visibility from within PRTG as to what is being monitored; Or
- Use an SSH Script sensor, create a custom script wrapper around the Nagios check_proc plugin. This adds an external dependency, causes a heavy load on the PRTG probe, and requires additional credentials to be setup
SNMP provides a standard way of doing this monitoring: The Host Resources MIB. This is how most monitoring applications do it (Solarwind, OpenNMS, OpManager, ...) This MIB provides a list of all running processes, with the processes names, parameters, status, cpu usage and memory usage.
This sensor could work similarly to the SNMP Disk Free sensor, whereupon sensor creation it could query all processes and display a table where the user could pick the list of processes to monitor. The sensor could provide channels with cpu, memory and number of instances, which could be alerted upon.
Acceptance criteria
- Monitor running processes using SNMP (lightweight) Host-Resources MIB (no remote configuration)
- Provide a UI to select which process(es) to monitor on Sensor creation
- Allow to alert on process non-running
- Allow to warning / Error based on CPU or memory consumption
- Allow to warning / Error based on the number of process instances running
Status
Open