SUMMARY: How to use SNMP to monitor for a panic?

Well, various folks suggested tools for monitoring SNMP stuff, including HP
OpenView, Nagios (free), and Tivoli Netview.  

But what I was really looking for was a way to "trap" a panic or a failure
of the init process.  This is a really stupid idea, as it turns out,
because, well, snmpd is a child of the init process, so isn't going to tell
me when init has died.

Damir Delija was kind enough to (nicely!) point out the flaw in my thinking,
and suggested a combination of monitoring network status with one of the
above tools, and monitoring the syslog for for the word "panic" - at least
this way once the machine comes back up it will alert me. 

However, since in my environment I am the only one who reboots the sun
machines, and only when I have to, I think the easiest thing to do is to put
a script in the standard startup routine that says pages me saying "hello,
<hostname> just rebooted" and dumps the output of "grep -i panic
/var/adm/messages" into the page.  That way I'll know when anything reboots,
even if it comes back too quickly to trigger a timeout on our network
monitoring tools.


-----Original Message-----
From: sunmanagers-bounces@sunmanagers.org
[mailto:sunmanagers-bounces@sunmanagers.org] On Behalf Of Dell, Mary
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 10:55 AM
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: How to use SNMP to monitor for a panic?

Hi folks,

I'd like to have my assorted monitoring tools use SNMP to trap next time a
machine panics, so that they can page me.  We're walking thru the sun-snmp
mib to see what a good way to do this is, and thinking maybe just monitoring
the status of init would do it.  But I'd like some advice on how other
people are doing this (specifically, monitoring kernel/init status, rather
than just pinging the nic, which we already do)...it's a murky, confusing
swamp, and of course since I had a panic last night I have to get it working
ASAP.

thanks for any advice!
Mary



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