Overview of Nagios: Know it from scratch

Nagios is free to use open-source software tools for continuous monitoring. It helps you to monitor systems, networks, and infrastructure. It is used for continuous monitoring of systems, applications, services, and business processes in a DevOps culture.

Nagios runs plugins stored on the same server. It plugin connects with a host or another server on your network or the Internet. Therefore, in the case of failure Nagios core can alert the technical staff about the issues. So, your technical team performs the recovery process before outage in the business processes.

Why We Need Nagios?

Here, are Important reasons to use Nagios monitoring tool are:

• Detects all types of network or server issues
• Helps you to find the root cause of the problem which allows you to get the permanent solution to the problem
• Active monitoring of your entire infrastructure and business processes
• Allows you to monitors and troubleshoot server performance issues
• Helps you to plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems create failures
• You can maintain the security and availability of the service
• Automatically fix problems in a panic situation

Get hands-on experience on Nagios tools from live experts at DevOps Online Training

History of Nagios

1996-Ethan Galstad uses the ideas and architecture of his earlier work to begin building a new application which runs under Linux OS

1999-The plugins that were which were originally distributed as a part of the NetSaint distribution are soon as a separate Nagios Plugins project

2002- Ethan renames the project to "Nagios" because of trademark issues with the name "NetSaint."

2005- Nagios becomes SourceForge.net Project of the Month in June

2009-Nagios Enterprises releases its first commercial version, Nagios XI

2012-Nagios again renamed as Nagios Core

2016-Nagios core surpasses 7,500,000 downloads directly from SourceForge.net website

Features of Nagios

Following are the important features of Nagios:

• Relatively scalable, Manageable, and Secure
• Good log and database system
• Informative and attractive web interfaces
• Automatically send alerts if condition changes
• If the services are running fine, then there is no need to do check that host is an alive
• Helps you to detect network errors or server crashes
• You can troubleshoot the performance issues of the server.
• The issues, if any, can be fixed automatically as they are identified during the monitoring process
• You can monitor the entire business process and IT infrastructure with a single pass
• The product's architecture is easy writing new plugins in the language of your choice
• Nagios allows you to read its configuration from an entire directory which helps you to decide how to define individual files
• Utilizes topology to determine dependencies
• Monitor network services like HTTP, SMTP, HTTP, SNMP, FTP, SSH, POP, etc.
• Helps you to define network host hierarchy using parent hosts
• Ability to define event handlers which runs during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
• Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts

Nagios Architecture

Nagios is a client-server architecture. Usually, on a network, a Nagios server is running on a host, and plugins are running on all the remote hosts which should be monitored.

1. The scheduler is a component of server part of Nagios. It sends a signal to execute the plugins at the remote host.
2. The plugin gets the status from the remote host
3. The plugin sends the data to the process scheduler
4. The process scheduler updates the GUI and notifications are sent to admins

Plugins:

Nagios plugins provide low-level intelligence on how to monitor anything and everything with Nagios Core. Plugins operate acts as a standalone application, but they are designed to be executed by Nagios Core. It connects to Apache that is controlled by CGI to display the result. Moreover, a database connected to Nagios to keep a log file.

How do plugins work?

Consider the above example-

• Check_nt is a plugin to monitor a windows machine which is mostly available in the monitoring server
• NSClinet++ should be installed in every Windows machine that you wants to monitor
• There is an SSL connection between the server and the host which continuously exchange information with each other

Likewise, NRPE(Nagios Remote plug-in Executor) and NSCA plugins are used to monitor Linux and Mac OS X respectively.

GUI:

An interface of Nagios is used to display in web pages generated by CGI. It can be buttons to green or red, sound, graph, etc.

When the soft alert is raised many times, a hard alert is raised, then the Nagios server sends a notification to the administrator.

Nagios GUI

Get practical working on Nagios from live experts at DevOps Online Course

Install Nagios at AWS

Step 1) Got to https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B0773T3529 and click Continue to Subscribe

Step 2) Accept Terms

Step 3) You will see subscription pending message

Step 4) Refresh the same page after a few minutes and click "Continue to Configuration

Step 5) Keep the settings default and click Continue to Launch

Step 6) Review the settings. Create a new Key and click launch

Step 7) Note the public DNS of your instance

Step 8) In your windows machine, use the tool putty generator to convert pem file to ppk

Step 9) In putty, enter the public DNS

Step 10) In Auth section, enter the ppk key and click open

Step 11) In terminal,

1. Enter login name as ubuntu
2. Run this command sudo htpasswd -c /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin
3. Enter a new password of your choice

Step 12) In your browser, Go to location http://<Public DNS>/nagios3 in my case http://ec2-54-209-48-136.compute-1.amazonaws.com/nagios3/.

Enter Username: nagiosadmin

pass: set in the previous step

Step 13) Nagios Loads

Application of Nagios

Nagios is a health check & monitoring system for a typical Data Centre, comprises all type of equipment's such as:

• Server & Network Nodes
• Application monitoring from a single console
• Application Monitoring with transaction-level insights
• Monitor Middleware & Messaging Components
• Customizable Reports and Dashboards
• UPS Backup System
• Bio-Metric Identification System
• Temperature & Humidity Control System (Sensing Mechanism)
• CCTV/NVR System
• Storage Subsystem (NAS&SAN)

Disadvantages of Using Nagios

• Important feature like wizards or interactive dashboard are only available on Nagios XI, which is quite an expensive tool
• Nagios core has a confusing interface
• There're many configuration files which are very hard to configure for users
• Nagios can't monitor network throughput
• The tool not allows you to manage the network but only allows to monitor the network
• Nagios makes no difference between various devices like servers, routers, or switches as it treats every device as a host

Know more information from live experts at DevOps Online Training India

Read More

What is DevOps as a Service?

What is DevOps?

They say that ‘collaboration is the key to success’ in software development. DevOps does exactly that. It is a culture which promotes collaboration between the development team and the operations team. That is how the word “DevOps” has been derived. DevOps is one of the factors 

We know that software delivery is no child’s play. That is why Agile organizations leverage DevOps to develop, test, deploy, and maintain an app with great speed, superior quality, and excellent control.

Get practical knowledge on DevOps from live experts at DevOps Online Training

Why DevOps is more than a need?

#1 Shorter Development Time, Faster Delivery

Before DevOps, the development and operations team worked in different silos. Due to it, the project got finished with more number of development cycles or didn’t finish at all. Now, as the development and operations teams work together, the number of development cycles have been reduced.

Key Takeaway

It helped business and enterprises to reduce their application time-to-market. Which means now they have more time to test market penetration of their app. They can do more marketing experiments with their app than earlier.

#2 Reduce Deployment Failures, Increase Recovery Time

DevOps increases the probability of finding errors in code. Faster the developers find a bug the quicker they will be able to solve it. DevOps not only makes development quicker but also reduces the risk of deployment failure as there will be minimum to almost none bugs in a code release.

Key Takeaway

It decreases rollbacks and increases the recovery time of an application. It will save developer’s time and energy as there will be lesser failures in every build release.

#3 Better Communication

DevOps is a culture. A software development culture that enables development and operations team to work together to produce stunning results. This collaboration will increase the productivity of both developers and operations team.

Key Takeaway

The wait for results is no longer. The ritual of turning over the application to operations people and await the result will be over. Since the developers can fix bugs and build the app faster, the deployment team will deploy the app quicker and reduce time-to-market.

#4 Higher Efficiency

DevOps helps developers to increase their programming efficiency. Development firms who follow DevOps are also using automation testing tools such as Selenium, Appium, Watir, etc. These tools help developers to identify the bugs quicker than manual testing methods.

Key Takeaway

The development process will become faster and less prone to errors at the same time.

#5 Reduce Cost by Reducing IT Staff

DevOps benefits to both software development companies as well as their customers. It helps to reduce human resources required to develop software. With automation testing and faster development, businesses can now hire fewer developers and still deploy their app on-time.

Key Takeaway

DevOps helps business, start-ups, and enterprises to save money on their mobile app or web app development project.

How DevOps is different from traditional IT?

DevOps is no different than traditional IT. Well, not literally. DevOps is a value addition to traditional IT. It adds value to every aspect of software development, which includes a software development company and its employees, customers, and the software itself.

DevOps is no rocket science. It’s the practices and policies of DevOps, which makes it different and better than traditional IT. Below are a few key factors which differentiate DevOps with traditional IT.

DevOps Lifecycle

So far we have identified that DevOps is good and it has greater benefits than what people see. These benefits are covered further in this article. But, before jumping on to the benefits of DevOps knowing its lifecycle is important.

There is a reason why we have an infinity symbol in DevOps. It stands for continuous improvement. Below is a continuous DevOps lifecycle.

DevOps Process Flow

DevOps lifecycle is all about bringing agility in development by means of introducing automation in various processes such as software testing. The DevOps process flow is all about driving production by bridging the gap between development and operations team through continuous integration, deployment, delivery, and feedback.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration or CI is a process where developers can update their small codes in a repository shared with the entire project team. Here their code is being tested and validated automatically. This repository helps to reduce delays as any team member can find the most up-to-date and validated version of the code at any time.

Continuous Delivery

After CI the next logical step would be CD or Continuous Delivery. CD helps the operations team to automatically build, test, and pack the code changes done during CI for release. Similar to CI, CD automates the delivery process for faster build releases.

Continuous Deployment

Unlike Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment is a process where no human intervention is required. There are tools which automatically tests and then release the code as soon as it detects the change in code.

Continuous Deployment eliminates the need to schedule release dates and quickens the feedback loop.

Continuous Feedback

Continuous Feedback is also a process which includes tools that help the operations team to detect bugs in a system and update the development team about them at the same time. It ensures higher reliability and better security of the software.

DevOps Principles

There are 6 principles one must keep in mind while implementing DevOps.

#1 Take Customer-Centric Actions

A DevOps company must always think from customer point-of-view and continually invest in services and products which adds value to their business.

#2 End-to-end Accountability

A DevOps team is accountable to deliver high-quality products to its customers and is also responsible to provide full support until the product expires.

#3 Continuous Improvement

DevOps culture believes in continuous improvement for which it has the CI/CD process which guarantees to minimize development time and cost.

#4 Automation Everywhere

Automation is at the core of DevOps. The process of DevOps is incomplete without automation. It increases the efficiency of software development.

#5 Teamwork

DevOps promotes teamwork. A DevOps team (designer, developer, and tester) sit together and work collaboratively in a single silo.

#6 Testing and Monitoring

As DevOps culture believes in continuous improvement, DevOps teams must test and monitor the application on a continuous basis.

Know more principles at DevOps Online Course

Benefits of DevOps as a Service

There are immense benefits of DevOps as a service. Below are some of the prominent benefits one can achieve by implementing DevOps as a service to upgrade their legacy systems.

Better collaboration

Cloud-based DevOps makes it easier for developers, designers, and testers to collaborate because of easy accessibility to all the files.

Faster testing and deployment

Cloud-based automation testing tools provide great power to the testers where they can test and deploy a piece of code faster than ever.

Reduces complexity

DevOps reduces the complexity of data and information flow. It means that now a software developer can test his/her code and an operations manager can make changes in the code wherever necessary through code and configuration management tools which save overall development and deployment time.

Highest quality product

Since DevOps is a continuous process, it leaves no room for enhancements and upgrades at the end of a software delivery unless there are changes in requirements.

Coexists with internal DevOps

It is not necessary to have DevOps in each and every process of development and delivery. DevOps mainly help to reduce turnaround time and increase collaboration among various team members of the project.

Final thoughts

Opting DevOps as a service will help you grow your business faster and allow you to deliver more value to your customers. Outsourcing DevOps services from a reputable company will help you escape from the worry about product planning, development, testing, deployment, and delivery. Whether you’re looking to develop a new application or you’re looking to upgrade your legacy apps,

Know more information from live experts at DevOps Online Training India

Read More

Continuous Testing: What exactly is it?

The aptly named DevOps practice of Continuous Testing synchronizes Testing/QA with Dev and Ops processes optimized to achieve business and development goals.

A few years ago when Agile was all the rage, lightning-fast Dev sprints left the Ops and QA personnel playing catch-up due to inadequate and sluggish testing practices with minimal coverage across frequent builds.

The widespread culture of Agile development has accelerated development while software testing still lags behind, forcing organizations to cut corners in QA or slow down Dev processes entirely.

Instead of speeding up the conveyor belt beyond control or slowing down development to kill efficiencies, Continuous Testing in DevOps encourages a systematic approach toward process improvement.

Continuous Testing goes beyond automation and encompasses all practices — including tooling and cultural change — that help mitigate risks before progressing to subsequent Software Development Lifecycle stages.

1. Get hands-on experience on continuous testing through DevOps Online Training

Continuous testing and Automation

The approach to Continuous Testing can vary and follow diverse pathways to ensure the best user experience is delivered, free of defects.

It’s barely viable to repeat all tests every time a new feature is added, so the Continuous Testing strategy fosters a company-wide cultural change to achieve four capabilities: Test early, test faster, test often and automate.

End-to-end test automation practices are intended to integrate QA into existing fast-paced Dev and Ops processes as a means to create continuity while maintaining faster development cycles.

It’s important to understand the role of automation in Continuous Testing. Automation alone does not enable continuity in testing, but it helps provide a qualitative assessment of risk and practice actionable tasks to mitigate these risks throughout the SDLC.

In essence, automated testing constitutes the detection process for software issues and defect prevention, whereas Continuous Testing addresses the wider challenge of improving the effectiveness of these detection sensors.

What does Continuous Testing Look Like

This example demonstrates how collaboration, automation and tooling enable end-to-end testing that’s performed faster, more often and better aligned with Agile Dev and Ops practices.

Continuous Testing starts within development processes as Devs use open source tools such as Selenium to test the functionality of their code.

Tools such as GitHub or other internal repositories can then be used to store tests and version together with the software code. DevOps teams can use the same tests to integrate frequent builds of the software with the Load Impact API.

Once the code reaches preproduction, dedicated QA teams can use these tests by modifying dynamic test parameters as appropriate. In the production environment, Ops can reuse these tests for acceptance testing and ongoing post production monitoring.

Once the application goes live, integration with existing APM tools help keep tabs on server-side app metrics.

Continuous Testing in this example is broken up into at least four environments: Development environment, Continuous Integration environment, QA Pre-production and Performance testing environment, and the Staging environment. Additional post-live monitoring further enable end-to-end continuous testing.

Key Elements of Continuous Testing

Parasoft, a global software solutions company, is one of the great thought leaders in DevOps and Continuous Testing. The company has laid out some key elements of the process in a fantastic e-book, and they’re definitely worth sharing here:

Risk Assessment: Covers risk mitigation tasks, technical debt, quality assessment and test coverage optimization to ensure the build is ready to progress toward next SDLC stage.

Policy Analysis: Ensure all processes align with the organization’s evolving business and compliance demands. Primary objectives include:

• Identifying trends associated with injection of dangerous patterns within the code

• Augmenting defect prevention practices for high risk areas
• Isolating risk in target areas

Requirements Traceability: Ensure true requirements are met and rework is not required. An object assessment to identify which requirements are at risk, working as expected or require further validation.

Advanced Analysis: Using automation in areas such as static code analysis, change impact analysis and scope assessment/prioritization to prevent defects in the first place and accomplishing more within each iteration.

Test Optimization: Ensure tests yield accurate outcomes and provide actionable findings. Aspects include Test Data Management, Test Optimization Management and Test Maintenance.

Service Virtualization: Early, frequent and everywhere testing requires access to real-world testing environments. Service visualization enables access to the virtual form of the required testing stages, cutting the waste time to test environment setup and availability.

An effective Continuous Testing strategy incorporates all of these elements and forces an organization-wide cultural change to synchronize Dev, Ops and QA/Testing as part of the true DevOps philosophy

Know more information at DevOps Online Training India
Twitter

Read More

Overview of Vagrant

In this, DevOps tutorial, in the environment set up, we have the created the VM ware manually and then install required operating systems like ubuntu ( Linux platform)  manually. And we have this through manually through Graphical User Interface ( GUI). But, rather than the GUI, we can perform all these actions from the command line itself. And we can make it possible through Vagrant.

What is vagrant?

A vagrant is a software that is responsible to manage the development environment. It is just another name for Virtual machine. With this tool, through the command line, we can grab any available operating system and can install, configure, run various commands inside the operating system.  This tool is responsible for making the entire process easy without effecting the main installation configuration files.  Vagrant support Virtual box, Hyper -v and docker. Moreover, this tool can also manage other machines like Amazon Ec2, VM ware and so on.

What is the need for Vagrant?

Usually, the project works in a certain condition, where there a combination of several software packages. Developers manually install that software in the application environment to run it smoothly. And some software does have some sort of dependencies to install in the environment. So even though from the same software is downloaded from the same link/ package, the software might not get installed in the system. This is because of the dependency for that software. So to avoid these kinds of problems. we people use Vagrant which take care of all these dependencies.

Vagrant allows us to share the work set up easily among the team members,  This tool plays a major role in deployment. It is responsible for making the necessary provision to the local system, before pushing to the actual environment.  Moreover, vagrant provides an easy way to share and share the application using a single text file called the vagrant file. 

Get practical knowledge on Vagrant from live experts at DevOps Online Course 

So let us see the installation and working of this tool practically

Vagrant Installation:

Step -1:

Download the tool to your local system through the following link according to your operating system

https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

step – 2:

Once the file gets downloaded to your machine, double click on the installer

step – 3:

Click on Run

step – 4:

Click on Next

step – 5:

Accept the License agreement and click on Next.

step – 6:

Click on Next

step – 7:

Click on install

Provide the confirmation of software installation  (usually, it takes 5 minutes to complete the installation.)

step – 8:

Once, installation completed, click on FINISH

So once, you click on FINISH, you need to restart your system. Once, you restarted your system, you can see Hashicorp folder in your system. And if you too can see this in your system, you are INN in installing the vagrant.

Since, we have successfully installed vagrant, its time to create the environment

Creating an Environment:

We can automate the environment creation, through Vagrant using Command prompt. So open the command prompt and change the working directory bin of the Hashicorp. Once you have done,  you can see your command prompt as shown below.

Now navigate to the following link and search for the box that you need

https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search

For instance, I would like to create the Ubuntu Environment.

so navigate to the command prompt and create the environment using the following command.

Once, installed, you can see your windows machines as follows:

Initialize ubuntu using the following command

Once added, you can see the confirmation as shown below

If you get the same kind of error then navigate back to the user holder and run the same command as shown below

And create the vagrant image with the following command

So once, the command gets executes, open your virtual box. Then you can see an image running there.

And once, you start running the machine trough Virtual box, you can see the screen that asks you to provide the username and password as shown below

Become the route with the following command

check the IP address of the machine using ifconfig

By default, you need it will be in series. So you need to change it to  192 series, by changing the NAT    to bridge adopter in VMWare settings. And you need to mention the port as 2222 from putty session

So once login, you can utilize the machine as per your requirement.

Besides, this automation can be done through AWS instance.

So get those at DevOps Online Training

Read More