GRAPH ALL THE THINGS: Alerting and Monitoring for Mac Admins

Speakers: Rick Heil

Level: Fundamental, Lecture

Excerpt: Every Mac, Linux, and Windows computer comes with a powerful Swiss Army Knife tool: the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). While SNMP in reality can be anything but simple, gathering basic metrics to keep yourself informed on your infrastructure sure is! Learn how to leverage and configure basic SNMP values and use Observium to keep a better handle on your uptime, downtime, and in between time.

Description: Every Mac, Linux, and Windows computer comes with a powerful Swiss Army Knife tool: the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). While SNMP in reality can be anything but simple, gathering basic metrics to keep yourself informed on your infrastructure sure is! Take away some of the mystery behind this powerful protocol and learn how to leverage it to keep yourself well informed of happenings around your infrastructure.

This presentation has two parts: a discussion of SNMP basics, and a demonstration of how to leverage those basics in a secure way with Observium to turn raw data into actionable alerts. No prior SNMP knowledge is necessary.

During the SNMP portion of the presentation, you’ll learn:
• SNMP terminology
• anatomy of the SNMP configuration files
• what a MIB is
• how to install and deploy Net-SNMP on OS X hosts (translates easily to Linux as well!)
• how to secure the Net-SNMP daemon

During the Observium portion of the presentation, you’ll learn:
• the basics of how Observium works, including the role of the poller
• how to add basic device polling and graphs into Observium
• how the Observium alert system works
• how to choose thresholds and timing for alerts
• how to configure the alerts and match them to the correct devices
• basics of the Observium Agent and cases where the agent can pull in additional valuable data


About the speakers

Rick Heil – Senior IT Manager – PARTNERS+simons (Twitter: twitter.com/refrshingapathy)

Rick is the Senior IT Manager for PARTNERS+simons, a full-service marketing communications firm with deep domain expertise in health sciences, technology, and financial services. As one of a two-person Mac Admin team, Rick’s goal is to automate himself out of a job so he can replace his desk with a couch.

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