Monitoring is a key component in a modern IT infrastructure. The term monitoring is no longer foreign to any system administrator. Unfortunately, in practice it is often different: sometimes even critical systems are not monitored sufficiently or not at all. This is because there is often simply not enough time to set up targeted monitoring. The open source monitoring tool open ITCOCKPIT aims to remedy this.
As the author of this article and developer of open TCOCKPIT, I have tried to ensure that it is very practical. You are therefore cordially invited to join in and interact with the monitoring tool while reading . You can download open ITCOCKPIT for free..
Monitoring systems face challenges
Hardly anything is as constant as the continuous change of IT infrastructure. While five years ago virtual machines dominated the picture, today applications in containers, provided in the cloud, are on everyone’s lips. Monitoring systems must of course reflect this Croatia Phone Number List technological change, but at the same time take into account the level of knowledge of the users. In most companies, monitoring is not a task that would justify a full-time position, but just another activity in day-to-day business. That’s why it’s important that a monitoring system can be used by any admin – regardless of whether he or she usually works with Windows or Linux.
Open ITCOCKPIT is a tool that attempts to achieve this balancing act with the help of its unique web interface. The web frontend allows complete configuration and administration. Experiences from different teams can be saved in service template groups as best practices. In addition, a set of templates provides assistance with the initial setup of the monitoring. Maintainability and integrability are also important aspects of openITCOCKPIT, which will be discussed in more detail later.
Installation and Updates
Open ITCOCKPIT is provided exclusively via Debian packages. This means that installation and – more importantly – the installation of subsequent Cell Phone Number Database updates are unproblematic. In addition, open ITCOCKPIT offers full support for ARM64 systems from version 4.2 onwards. For the examples in this article, the open ITCOCKPIT system is therefore installed on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB RAM and an external SSD (USB3). This installation is in no way different from installing the tool on a virtual machine or hardware.
However, if you want to use a Raspberry Pi, it is important to use the ARM64 version of the Raspberry Pi OS(not the 32-bit version ARMhf!).
The installation is done simply via apt:
The basic configuration for Open ITCOCKPI In order to use the open ITCOCKPIT web interface, you first need to create a new user. For the first user, this is done via the console (Figure 1), while all other users can then be easily managed in the web frontend.
A wizard guides the user through the individual Bulk Database steps of the basic setup. Only the user information is required. Details, such as the configuration of an email server, can be left at the default values.
Once the setup is complete, the open ITCOCKPIT web frontend can be accessed via browser. Basic monitoring using the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent
As already mentioned, many systems currently only have rudimentary monitoring. This is also due to the fact that each operating system requires different methods and agents for its monitoring. Depending on the protocol, firewall rules must first be created or approvals obtained. Each agent that is to be used must also be configured individually. Unfortunately, it is not always clear whether the data transmitted is securely encrypted.
