EMEA User Conference: Using Nagios

In today’s environment, not only must an email system do its job by routing adequately and efficiently our customers’ messages, but it must also come with a practical and widely accepted way for being monitored.

Sendmail’s approach in this is unique because not only can SNMP be used to query simple events from the Sentrion Appliances, but we also widely support another great tool for monitoring service platforms: Nagios.

This Open Source product gives a great flexibility in monitoring service platforms like our customer’s Core Mail Routing components running on Sentrion Appliances. This tool allows Sentrion to fetch complex information much easier which is useful for assessing a mail platform’s health – for example:

- get email traffic data, provide graphs & alerts
- monitor system components (hardware, operating system key values)
- group services and manage alerts at a cluster level rather than on
an individual basis.

The feedback from our customers at the recent European User Group encourages us to continue integrating Nagios with Sentrion and adding
new apps.  Not only do our customers like using Nagios as a tool, they like it so much that they even themselves extend its capabilities to add
nice Nagios extensions & monitor other service platforms with it.

If you have not looked at Nagios I encourage you to do so.

About Christophe Wolfhugel

Christophe Wolfhugel, who is an integral part of the EMEA team and based in London, has been involved with mail systems, particularly Sendmail, since 1990. He has designed and deployed complex messaging infrastructures for major customers in the industry and banking sectors across Europe and the U.S. Prior work experience gained Christophe expertise not only on applications, but also with large enterprise IP networks. During the 1990s, Christophe co-founded the first French professional ISP, Oléane, which was subsequently acquired by France Télécom. There, he designed his first large email platform with opensource sendmail. He has also worked as a Network and Systems Engineer at Institut Pasteur, and as a security consultant for HSC, where he implemented Sendmail-based email filtering. Follow me on Twitter: @cwolfhugel.
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2 Responses to EMEA User Conference: Using Nagios

  1. Most interesting. With a total of 11 Sentrions broken into three clusters, this type of monitoring would be quite useful.

    Is there any place where I could look to get more information about using Nagios with the Sentrions? The Nagios.org site doesn’t seem to have anything for the Sentrion.

  2. Dave,

    all of the custom plugins that Christophe has developed ship on the Sentrion today. You’ll find the code in /usr/local/nagios on your Sentrion.

    Sendmail can gladly help designing and implementing the rest – I’ll make sure your comment comes to the attention of your SE and sales rep.

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