[ale] SNMP oid for file descriptors

[Jerald Sheets]

There are SO many tools out there that do this for you.  Open Source and commercial products, too.

Puppet/Chef will give you a system inventory from the hardware perspective (they both use things like dmiedcode, and some ruby “secret sauce” to make that happen).  Instrumenting your OS that way is a cool thing to try.  I saw one site implement Puppet to only do three things:

1. Get the machine inventory
2. Use mcollective to do orchestrated functions in “collectives” of machines
3. Enforce NTP/SSH config across their env.


There’s tools.  Don’t try and reinvent the wheel.


—j



> On Aug 10, 2018, at 2:20 PM, Todor Fassl via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
> Ah, now I am starting to get it.
> 
> It occurs to me that this is a good approach in general for solving all kinds of system monitoring problems. Like I once worked for a web hosting service. We stored info about each account in a file within the account. But how to get to that info remotely? We considered picking a port number, inventing our own protocol, and writing a TCP/IP server. Should have just added it to snmp and used snmp's own security protocols to protect it. Before that I worked for a company that wrote drivers for medical scanners. We *did* pick a port number and invent our own protocol to get status info from the scanner.
> 
> The beauty of the thing, besides not re-inventing the wheel, is that standard tools like nagios could be used to monitor the data.
> 
> I'll have to do some research.
> 
> 
> 
> On 08/07/2018 10:55 AM, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>> You create your own OID table entry.  Use the extend or pass-through
>> capability of snmpd and a shell script to generate an SNMP table or tree
>> output and then obtain it starting with the base tree
>> NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB::nsExtensions (.1.3.6.1.4.1.8072.1.3)
>> On 2018-08-07 07:00, Todor Fassl via Ale wrote:
>>> Well, I am not too worried about being able to calculate it. What I
>>> cannot figure out is how to get to the numbers remotely.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 08/06/2018 01:21 PM, Jerald Sheets wrote:
>>>> Why not pull the number of file handles you have: "sysctl fs.file-nr"
>>>> and compare it to current open file handles “lost |wc -l” and do a
>>>> multi-graph for the metrics.  Then, also subtract the two and alert
>>>> when you get below whatever threshold you want?
>>>> 
>>>> I think you should be able to knock that out in BASH or Perl.
>>>> 
>>>> —j
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Aug 6, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Todor Fassl via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Ultimately, what I want to do is to configure nagios to alert me when
>>>>> a server is getting low on file handles. There are a couple of
>>>>> scripts on the nagios web site but they look kind of hokey.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I think all I should have to do is cut/pasete the right SNMP object
>>>>> identifier into the nagios snmp plugin. But how to find that oid?
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Ale mailing list
>>>>> Ale at ale.org
>>>>> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>>>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>>>>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>>> 
>>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> 
> --
> Todd
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 874 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20180811/57970621/attachment.sig>