Centreon basics
How do I get my monitoring platform up and running?β
Centreon provides you with a ready-to-use central server. Before you can start monitoring resources, all you have to do is to:
- Install your pollers (following the prerequisites). They will monitor your resources.
- Install the plugin packs you will need to monitor your resources.
What does Centreon monitor?β
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, 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 one or several check commands that collect 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?β
In order to collect each indicator value, monitoring plugins are used which are periodically executed by a collection engine called Centreon Engine.
How do I see the resources being monitored?β
Once hosts and services are monitored, they have a status in Centreon (e.g. OK, Warning, Critical...). You can keep track of any changes using the Monitoring > Resources Status page.
You can also use custom views to create dashboards.
If a problem 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?β
In Centreon, monitoring is made easy by the following elements:
Host templates and service templates, that allow you to define default values so as to speed up the creation of these objects.
Plugin Packs, 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 Plugin Pack templates to a host for it to be monitored.
The autodiscovery feature for hosts and services, that allows you to get a list of new hosts and services and to add them automatically to the list of monitored resources.