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Version: 22.10

Knowledge Base

Introduction​

In Centreon Open Source suite since 2.8.0 version, Knowledge Base allow you to easily associate a wiki with Centreon Web.

It creates links between hosts and services and specific procedure on Wiki.

To make things more flexible, procedures can be associated with templates.

Knowledge Base is the solution to easily link a Wiki to Centreon.

Prerequisites​

Centreon Knowledge Base requires MediaWiki to be installed (version = 1.31) on your system.

You can download MediaWiki here and access the documentation here.

Configure the access to the wiki​

Before starting with Knowledge Base, you need to configure it to access the wiki database.

For this go to Administration > Parameters > Knowledge Base and complete the form

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User guide​

Definition​

A procedure is basically a technical documentation allowing operators to know what to do when an alert is raised in Centreon.

Procedures can be of different natures:

  • Describe actions to solve a problem,
  • Escalate the issue to another team,
  • Open a support ticket,
  • Warn users that a specific service is down.

A procedure can be defined for an host or a service.

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Displayed procedure: template and overload​

To avoid too much workload on the procedure deployment, the functionality allows administrator to setup a single procedure for hosts/services.

So a procedure can be specified for a given host/service but can be specified as well for a host/service template.

If a procedure is defined at template level, all children of the template will have the procedure attached as well unless overloaded by a specific one. The mechanism is identical to template system in Centreon with inheritance.

Knowledge Base function is designed to avoid adding or updating manually several times the same procedure in knowledge base.

When a user clicks on a host procedure:

  • if a specific procedure is defined for this host, its wiki page is displayed
  • if no specific procedure is defined bu the host template has a procedure, the host template wiki page is displayed
  • if host template has no procedure defined, parents template will be checked for a defined procedure
  • finally if no procedure is defined in the template tree, a message will warn that there is no procedure defined for this host

It's the same for services.

Create / Update / Delete a procedure​

Navigate in Centreon front-end to Configuration > Knowledge Base sub-menus to:

  • List Hosts / Services / Host Templates / Service Templates and attached procedures
  • Create / View / Edit / View history for a Host / Services / Host Templates / Service Templates
  • List Hosts / Services / Host Templates / Service Templates without procedure defined

The technical procedure is available in Centreon front-end through a link icon:

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By clicking on link icon, the user is redirected to the corresponding procedure.

If the link icon is on the left of a host name, the wiki page containing the procedure for the host will be displayed.

If the link icon is on the right of a service name, the wiki page containing the procedure for the service will be displayed.

Synchronization​

There's a cron job that updates hosts, services and hosts/services templates configuration.

For example, if you create a page in the wiki using the usual pattern (ex: Host:Centreon-Server or Service:Centreon-Server Disk-/), the cron will add the link to the page in the URL field of object's extended information.

Best practice for deployment​

To deploy procedures in the best way, we strongly advice you to use the multi level inheritance system.

The best practice is to define procedures at template level as much as you can.

Here is an example of an host template configuration tree:

  • Linux > Generic-hosts
  • Windows > Generic-hosts
  • RedHat > Linux
  • Debian > Linux
  • Active-Directory > Windows
  • LDAP > Linux

To setup procedures for the RedHat host template, just proceed as indicated in Link from monitoring front end.

In the template tree we see that the RedHat template inherits from two other templates: Linux and Generic-hosts. In this example all hosts using the RedHat host template will have the new procedure defined attached.

We could setup a procedure at a higher level in the template tree, it will impact more hosts.

For example if we define a procedure for Linux host template, all hosts using RedHat, Debian and LDAP host templates will have the procedure attached by inheritance. Because Linux is the parent template.

Behavior is the same for service templates.

To delete a procedure link for specific host / service / template, edit the object and empty the URL field in Extended Information tab.

If the object inherits from any template of a procedure, the empty value will overload and delete the procedure link.