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Red Hat Network Satellite 5.1.1 Reference Guide
Chapter 7. Monitoring
T he Red Hat Network Monitoring entitlement allows you to perform a whole host of actions designed to
keep your systems running properly and efficiently. With it, you can keep close watch on system
resources, network services, databases, and both standard and custom applications.
Monitoring provides both real-time and historical state-change information, as well as specific metric
data. You are not only notified of failures immediately and warned of performance degradation before it
becomes critical, but you are also given the information necessary to conduct capacity planning and
event correlation. For instance, the results of a probe recording CPU usage across systems would prove
invaluable in balancing loads on those systems.
Monitoring entails establishing notification methods, installing probes on systems, regularly reviewing the
status of all probes, and generating reports displaying historical data for a system or service. T his
chapter seeks to identify common tasks associated with the Monitoring entitlement. Remember, virtually
all changes affecting your Monitoring infrastructure must be finalized by updating your configuration,
through the Scout Config Push page.
7.1. Prerequisites
Before attempting to implement RHN Monitoring within your infrastructure, ensure you have all of the
necessary tools in place. At a minimum, you need:
Monitoring entitlements — T hese entitlements are required for all systems that are to be monitored.
Monitoring is supported only on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.
RHN Satellite Server with Monitoring — Monitoring systems must be connected to a Satellite with a
base operating system of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 Update 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4, or
later. Refer to the RHN Satellite Server Installation Guide within Help for installation instructions.
Contact a Red Hat sales representative to purchase Satellite.
Monitoring Administrator — T his role must be granted to users installing probes, creating notification
methods, or altering the monitoring infrastructure in any way. (Remember, the Satellite Administrator
automatically inherits the abilities of all other roles within an organization and can therefore conduct
these tasks.). Assign this role through the User Details page for the user.
Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon — T his daemon, along with the SSH key for the scout, is
required on systems that are monitored in order for the internal process monitors to be executed.
You may, however, be able to run these probes using the systems' existing SSH daemon (sshd).
Refer to Section 7.2, “Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (rhnm d)” for installation instructions and
a quick list of probes requiring this secure connection. Refer to Appendix C, Probes for the complete
list of available probes.
7.2. Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (rhnmd)
T o get the most out of your Monitoring entitlement, Red Hat suggests installing the Red Hat Network
Monitoring Daemon on your client systems. Based upon OpenSSH, rhnm d enables the RHN Satellite
Server to communicate securely with the client system to access internal processes and retrieve probe
status.
Please note that the Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon requires that monitored systems allow
connections on port 4545. You may avoid opening this port and installing the daemon altogether by
using sshd instead. Refer to Section 7.2.3, “Configuring SSH” for details.
7.2.1. Probes requiring the daemon
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