Self Monitoring

NetEye relies on two mechanisms for the purpose of self monitoring: a special neteye-local host to be monitored and a number of health checks that are carried out on that host.

Default Host and Service Check Creation

As part of the initial installation, NetEye 4 creates a default host (HOST_NAME="neteye-local") that represents the NetEye monitoring system itself. This host serves as a vehicle for conducting default service checks on NetEye itself to monitor its own configuration, disk space, resources, systemd services, etc.

For instance, if you have SIEM module installed and a log retention policy set, a service check is added to the above host to regularly ensure that log retention is actually being carried out.

To perform one of these checks, the installation will also create a corresponding command <cmd> along with:

• A service template (neteye-check-template) if not already created

• A service template called <cmd>-neteyelocal-template which imports neteye-check-template

• A service called <cmd>-neteyelocal which imports neteye-check-template

You should not modify the name of these objects, because the next time you run neteye install they will be recreated. Should you not want one of these NetEye checks to be performed, please disable the corresponding service.

Host to Service View

A user can drill down from the host overview to the services view of a specific host with a single click. This will help user to see all the services with status associated with a host.

Previously, when a user clicked on a specific host on the host overview, he would have been redirected to the host-details view.

Note

The user can anytime rollback to the default functionality (i.e., host to host details view), by disabling the host2servicedetailview module in NetEye (Configuration ‣ Modules ‣ host2servicedetailview)

The NetEye Health Check

Just as NetEye monitors the states of hosts and servers, it is also important to monitor the health of NetEye itself. In fact, there are multiple reasons for monitoring NetEye’s health, and thus the health checks are divided into two types:

• The Light check is a sequence of very lightweight checks (think ping) that tells you quickly whether important parts of NetEye are up and running. Running a light check is almost instantaneous, with very little computational impact on the NetEye server.

• Deep checks instead are intended for tasks like verifying the integrity and consistency of resources. They can be computationally expensive and are typically used before an update or upgrade.

Because the light check has such a slight impact, it can itself be used as a monitoring command, just like any other monitoring check. This includes using it in Director (as neteye check), where it might run every 5 minutes, and trigger notifications on a specific result. The deep check on the other hand should not be used as a monitoring command because it would interrupt other NetEye functions.

Scenarios in which the use of deep checks is suggested include:

1. Before and after a NetEye upgrade. The update and upgrade procedures are indeed important tasks to carry out to ensure that NetEye works smoothly and is constantly up to date with the latest features and bug fixes. It is therefore a good practice to ensure that the health of a NetEye installation, either single or within a cluster, is acceptable, both before and after the upgrade. How to check the health of NetEye in this scenario is explained in the dedicated section at the bottom of this page.

2. After a power outage. When power goes suddenly out, a number of processes may be interrupted while they are operating, with the result that data might be lost and configurations might be broken, therefore running a deep health check after resuming operation is a good practice.

3. When manually troubleshooting a failing light check to find the root cause. Light checks might fail for a number of reason, not always obvious at a first inspection. To find the real reason for a lightweight check to fail, a deep health check might provide a more thorough analysis and detailed information about the failure.

Health Checks provided by NetEye Core or Additional Components are performed with a command that is automatically attached via the health-check-neteyelocal service to the neteye-local host.

Technical Details

Both the light and deep checks are implemented as shell commands that call a set of scripts in a particular order. These scripts can also be run individually.

Note

For security reasons, some of the scripts are not cluster aware: they in fact verify the state of the node they are running on without checking the states of the other nodes in a NetEye cluster. To ensure the cluster is healthy, execute the checks on each node and make sure no one is failing.

The syntax of the commands are as follows:

# neteye health light
# neteye health deep
# neteye check

They each return a standard monitoring exit code (a number 0-3). Note however that only the third command should be used for monitoring purposes. Also, the current implementation of the neteye check command is to call the light health check.

The scripts called by the health checks can be found in the following directories:

/usr/share/neteye/scripts/neteye/health.d/light/
/usr/share/neteye/scripts/neteye/health.d/deep/

If an error occurs when one of the scripts is running, the output will also contain the path to the individual script that failed.

Pre-Update and Pre-Upgrade Checks

Before any update or upgrade procedure, it is recommended to monitor the health of the NetEye installation via health checks.

A deep check can be run by typing the following command:

# neteye health deep
OK - All deep health checks succeeded.
[..]

Remember that, in case of a cluster, the checks must be executed on every node before continuing with the update or the upgrade procedure.

Furthermore, to ensure that an update or upgrade will go smoothly, the neteye update or neteye upgrade will also check that the system is prepared. For instance, one check will search for any .rpmnew and .rpmsave files created during the update/upgrade process.

If one or more of these checks fail, the neteye update or neteye upgrade script will halt before the update/upgrade begins. In this case, it is enough to fix the problem and then re-run the neteye update or neteye upgrade.