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Centreon basics

What does Centreon monitor?​

Centreon allows you to monitor resources. Resources can be hosts or services:

  • A host is any device that has an IP address and that one wishes to monitor. For example, it could be a physical server, a virtual machine, a temperature probe, an IP camera, a printer or a storage space.
  • A service is a check point to be monitored on a host. A service consists of a check command that collects metrics concerning a specific aspect of a host (CPU usage rate, temperature, motion detection, bandwidth usage rate, disk I/O, and so on). For instance, a service called Memory has the following metrics: buffer, cached, usage, free, shared and used_prct.

How does the monitoring work?​

In order to collect each indicator value, monitoring plugins are used. These are periodically executed by a collection engine called Centreon Engine.

How do I see the resources being monitored?​

Once hosts and services are monitored, they have a status in Centreon (e.g. OK, Warning, Critical, etc.). You can keep track of any changes using the Monitoring > Resources Status page.

You can also use custom views to create dashboards.

If an alert occurs (not-OK/not-UP status), contacts/users will be able to receive notifications, within set time periods.

What features can I use to help me monitor hosts?​

In Centreon, monitoring is made easy by the following elements:

  • Host templates and service templates that allow you to define default values to speed up the creation of these objects.

  • Monitoring Connectors that provide ready-to-use host and service templates. These greatly simplify the configuration of hosts and services: for instance, all you have to do is to apply Monitoring Connector templates to a host for it to be monitored.

  • The autodiscovery feature for hosts and services, which allows you to obtain a list of new hosts and services and add them automatically to the list of monitored resources.