Installation guide

Monitoring provides both real time and historical state change information, as well as specific metric
data. It provides notifications of system failures and performance degradation before it becomes critical.
It also provides information that assists in capacity planning and event correlation. For example, the
results of a probe recording CPU usage across systems would assist in balancing loads on those
systems.
There are two components to the monitoring system: the monitoring system and the monitoring scout.
The monitoring system is installed in the Satellite and performs backend functions such as storing
monitoring data and acting on it. T he monitoring scout runs all the probes and collects monitoring data.
The monitoring scout can be enabled to run on a Satellite or Red Hat Satellite Proxy system. Using
monitoring scout on Proxy allows you to offload work from the Satellite, providing scalability for probes.
Monitoring entails establishing notification methods, installing probes on systems, regularly reviewing the
status of all probes, and generating reports displaying historical data for a system or service. T his
section seeks to identify common tasks associated with the Monitoring entitlement. Remember, virtually
all changes affecting your Monitoring infrastructure must be finalized by updating your configuration,
through the Scout Config Push page.
1.2.1. Prerequisites
Before attempting to implement Red Hat Network Monitoring within your infrastructure, ensure you have
all of the necessary tools in place. At a minimum, you need:
Monitoring entitlements - These entitlements are required for all systems that are to be monitored.
Monitoring is only supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.
Red Hat Satellite with monitoring - monitoring systems must be connected to a Satellite with a base
operating system of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or later.
Monitoring Administrator - This role must be granted to users installing probes, creating notification
methods, or altering the monitoring infrastructure in any way. (Remember, the Satellite Administrator
automatically inherits the abilities of all other roles within an organization and can therefore conduct
these tasks.). Assign this role through the User Details page for the user.
Red Hat Network monitoring daemon - This daemon, along with the SSH key for the scout, is required
on systems that are monitored in order for the internal process monitors to be executed. You may,
however, be able to run these probes using the systems' existing SSH daemon (sshd). See
Section 1.2.2, “Configuring the Red Hat Network Monitoring Daemon (rhnmd)” for installation
instructions and a quick list of probes requiring this secure connection. See Appendix A, Probes for
the complete list of available probes.
Enabling Monitoring
Monitoring is disabled by default, and will need to be enabled before it can be used.
1. Log in as a user with Satellite Administrator privileges and navigate to Admin → Red Hat
Satellite Configuration. Click the Enable Monitoring checkbox, then click Update to save.
2. Restart services to pick up the changes. Go to the rest art tab to restart the Satellite. This will
take the Satellite offline for a few minutes.
3. Check if the Monitoring tab is available under Red Hat Satellit e Configuration to confirm that
monitoring is enabled.
4. Navigate to Admin → Red Hat Satellite Configuration → Monitoring. Click the Enable
Monitoring Scout checkbox to enable the scout. Click Update Config to save.
Chapter 1. Red Hat Satellite Information
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