HP XC System Software Administration Guide Version 3.1

The syslog service runs on each node in the HP XC system. These daemons capture log
information and send it to an aggregator regional node. Regional nodes are assigned to each
client node.
The syslogng_forward service on each regional node enables the node to act as a log
aggregator for the global node. Log information is gathered, consolidated, and forwarded to the
global node; the global node is not necessarily the head node.
Nagios has a syslog plug-in , check_syslogAlerts, that applies a set of rules against all
the events in the consolidated log file and generates alerts for those events that match one of the
rules. The rules reside in the /opt/hptc/nagios/etc/syslogAlertRules. You can modify
this rules file if you want to add additional rules.
7.2 Monitoring Strategy
The HP XC system monitoring strategy is built on open source tools that are configured automatically to
provide a seamless integration with the HP XC system. The key open source components of the monitoring
suite are:
• Nagios
• Supermon
• syslog and syslog-ng
The syslog-ng tool provides consolidated logging across the HP XC system. The supermon tool allows
metrics to be gathered efficiently throughout the HP XC system and aggregated into the Configuration
and Management database (CMDB). Nagios provides dynamic health monitoring and reporting as well
as integration of the various monitoring services. Figure 7-1 illustrates the interaction of these tools.
Figure 7-1 System Monitoring
The mond and syslog daemons run on every node. The Supermon service manages requests for mond
daemons that run on a subset of nodes. The mond daemon can be configured to pass any metric data for
aggregation to the parent Supermon service. The Nagios master and other Nagios monitors run their
check_metrics plug-in periodically, which causes Supermon data collection and storage into the
84 Monitoring the System