A better monitoring solution

[darren_g]

Hi folks.

I've been investigating doing some proper monitoring of my PAN devices for a while - CACTI does the basics, and with some help from here I managed to make it work, but the results are less than sterling, to say the least.

I don't have the programming/scripting brains to write a decent plugin for Nagios, so I was a bit stumped.

Until I stumbled on Observium - http://http://www.observium.org/wiki/Main_Page

I just spent a couple of hours spinning up a VM to run this on, and it is, to be frank, completely AWESOME.

No templates. No plugins to make work. Just SNMP.

And it works for almost *everything* on my PA2020's (running 5.0.4 as of yesterday). CPU. Sessions. Interfaces. Fan Speeds. temperature. It reads (and graphs) the lot.

If you're looking for an alternative to Cacti or Nagios, then I heartily suggest you check Observium out. Note that you will either need some Linux knowledge or be a hot php programmer to port it to Windows - there is NO Windows support for running this application on - it *monitors* Windows servers just fine, you just can't run it on one.

[LP101835]

Thanks for the tip Darren. Will take a look.

[dt502e]

Would anyone be interested in a Nagios plugin for Palo Alto? I have one written currently.

[jvalentine]

I would love to see the nagios plugin. Thanks for the observium tip!

[darren_g]

I should add a comment to this.

While Observium does work pretty well with Palo Alto devices, the development team is run by an immature jerk.

If you install this, don't expect any kind of public support for it unless you walk the road of Ubuntu and do it exactly to his rule (and I use the word correctly) about how the world should be run.

I have to rescind my recommendation - make do with Cacti and Nagios, folks, because Observium isn't worth the agro of trying to get it to work properly and listening to the immature replies of the moron who leads the development team.

Sorry for giving people a bum steer, or false hope, if there is any,

[ericgearhart]

There is hope! I have been monitoring my PA's with Zabbix and it has been working great. In Zabbix 2.2 support for SNMPv3 with AES/SHA is being implemented as well, further cementing it for us as a monitoring solution

(right now only SNMPv3 3DES/MD5 is supported on the Zabbix side, and only AES/SHA is supported on the PA side, which created a deadlock. Basically you have to use SNMP v2c)

[samkolars]

It's been a few years but I'd like to take a peek at the nagios template if you've still have something you've been maintaining