Company Profile
Bitnetix provides outsourced IT management and consulting to non-profits and small and medium businesses. Bitnetix’s SmartVox division provides voice over IP (VoIP) services through both onsite and cloud-based hosted servers. As a recognized leader in the field of IT monitoring, Bitnetix has received numerous awards for its work with Nagios.
Business Needs
Bitnetix was working with a customer that used Nagios Core with a Livestatus configuration that monitored dynamically generated Amazon Web Services servers responsible for delivering thousands of emails to customers. The customer wanted to roll over to a new Nagios XI installation with zero downtime and integrate with Chef. The customer also used Pager Duty to receive notifications, so Nagios had to integrate with the company’s existing system while making sure no notifications were lost in the transition.
“The benefits that Nagios XI provided over Nagios Core made a huge difference.”
– Eric Loyd, CEO, Bitnetix
The Challenge
Bitnetix faced an uphill battle creating appropriate checks within Nagios XI to duplicate what the Livestatus configuration was achieving and ensuring there was absolutely no downtime in the process. Not to mention, the company had to achieve integration with Nagios XI and Chef with no downtime.
Why Nagios?
Nagios lent our expertise to Bitnetix’s by:
- Setting up an integrated Nagios XI configuration file import with a Chef export on the Nagios server
- Pre-populating all machines with XI and having the customers disable the machines in Core and enable them in XI as they saw fit for their business needs
- Setting up an integrated Nagios XI configuration file import with a Chef export on the Nagios server
- Pre-populating all machines with XI and having the customers disable the machines in Core and enable them in XI as they saw fit for their business needs
- Ensuring that contact management was integrated with LDAP (Active Directory) so that people could log in to see the necessary information
- Integrating XI with Pager Duty via a Perl script that provided instant notification to Pager Duty, with an escalation defined as a secondary notification in case the Pager Duty notification failed
The Bottom Line
With Nagios, Bitnetix helped the email marketer achieve:
- The ability to dynamically add or remove Nagios clients without having to specifically address or remove them
- The ability to have Chef handle all adds and removes and assign host groups based on attributes stored in Chef created an automatic Nagios feature that dramatically improved the process
