Keep an eye on your network - Observium Tutorial

[@jbevren]

I use Observium already, and wanted to note that my network printer and Observium even work together to accurately report levels and lifespan of internal components like the toner level and drum/fuser life remaining.

[@AdamArmstrong]

You can thank Tom for his printer obsession! 😅

[@TheRogueBro]

No notification (because i have those turned off) but literally like "oh hey, i forgot something and i know Jeff made a video"... Now i have no idea what i was looking for because here i am watching this one. Thanks Jeff... :-P

[@RyanDurbin10]

This always happens to me...

[@adker1986]

I have a whole playlist of the videos Jeff has posted that I find useful and may need to refer back too. Of course I may have to start a second because it's getting large

[@ozmosyd]

A rather excellent intro into snmp. Thanks for sharing chap!

[@praecorloth]

"SNMP: Four lies in one acronym" -Michael Lucas

[@praecorloth]

So last I looked, WMI isn't going away, one of the management tools for WMI is going away. SNMP, however, is going away. Microsoft has already started the process. Not so much that they're not using SNMP with new features in Windows moving forward, but SNMP support was actively removed from their DHCP service. The last version of Windows you can query the DHCP service with SNMP was Server 2012 r2, iirc. 2016 and up, SNMP provides no information on DHCP.

[@JB-fh1bb]

@@praecorloth MS likes vendor lock-in, and SNMP is too standardized, making it too easy to switch your OS while keeping your monitoring tools. Thus, they must make a “better” service that works well enough that product managers believe the hype and sysadmins are not literally rioting at having to use it.

[@Mzansi74]

🤣

[@raymondt7237]

Thank you for going into so much detail regarding SNMP and WMI lifecycle and setup. Really appreciated.

[@wizdude]

Thanks for this tutorial - especially for all the DCOM configuration notes. All in one digestible section. Nice. Cheers 😊

[@TobiasMann7]

I'd love to see what you look for when diagnosing common network anomalies.

[@CMDRSweeper]

I would say that depends entirely on the network. The basic diagnostic mentality still stands regardless if it is a car, network, computer or something complex. You have a box that is too big to explore, too big to do something meaningful with, so you basically have to start a process of elimination. Basically find a way to make the box smaller but cutting out potential "troublemakers" and simplifying it. There are rarely a common smoking gun that anyone can point at, there are common ones, but they can change pending on how the network is set up. Home A and Home B, and even Business A and business B can have wildly different causes of their problems, which is why making it smaller is what you have to work on. If it is a bad cable that seems to only act up on hot days because it is hidden deep inside the wall, or it is a service that breaks, you will often find it after eliminating what is working in the chain.

[@Apaurie]

​@@CMDRSweeper And if your issue is about network hardware card ? For instance one the NYC, adpater integrated or not you can have is bugged. Physically working but not responding as it's intended ? How physically can you detect this ? Intern software dedicated to theses components or do we have other things to consider ?

[@CMDRSweeper]

@@Apaurie Well you deploy the same service to a different machine, this is in the phase where you try to rule out if it is hardware related or software related as you make the box smaller. In your example you will notice that it seems to work and your box is pointing to the hardware which could be a NIC, or something else, but you now have narrowed it down. Of course, it all depends on what tools you have available to you, but you have to find a way to isolate probable causes to tackle them. An example of a cause I tracked down was that Realtek network cards with my switch have a tendency to "kill" ports on it under Linux. Basically what happens is that the port goes dead on the switch as if nothing was connected, reconnecting the cable does nothing. How did I arrive at a firmware bug? Well I put a different NIC in from a different vendor and it worked for days. But part of the diagnostic was that I did try to connect directly to the Realtek based NIC and it would respond fine, even if I swapped ports it would work for 2-3 days again, but that old port was dead. Only commonality I had was that it was running Realtek under Linux, which had reports of being buggy, so I swapped the NIC to get around the problem.

[@srsys88]

Ty for the run down on Observium. I would love a vid diving into using this to monitor networking equipment and printers.

[@TheTechnicalMiracle]

That shirt is amazing.

[@squirrel_ca9745]

Great content as always. Would love to see a more in-depth video on this. Thanks again for the great content.

[@haydenc2742]

Just follow his text in the link...copy and paste I did change the line to one line though sudo apt update && sudo apt install snmpd -y easy peasy to install on LAN devices to see their status's...but like he said DO NOT open it to the WAN...unless you use the encrypted v3

[@vaitomanocularrypage]

agree

[@handlealreadytaken]

Would be great to spend a little time showing what the Observium software looks like and how easy it is to work with. I skimmed the video twice and nearly all the content was how to setup the clients to report data.

[@handlealreadytaken]

@Scott Myers flashed on the screen for 2 seconds. Try harder to troll next time.

[@TheRobMozza]

Love that T-Shirt 🤣🍻

[@RARvolt]

I would recommend SHA-256 instead of MD5. Or is there preventing it?

[@camerontgore]

My thoughts exactly!

[@Neptunesplayground0]

SHA-256 supremacy!

[@elminster8149]

MD5 is no longer secure.

[@mncllama]

I have to elaborate slightly as I felt very similar when I had that beer before sending it to you. I agree the description on the can wasn't quite there and your review was spot on. Now for the price reveal, for a $8 for the 4 pack of 16oz cans it makes a decent lawn mower beer, they have a whole series of "beer that tastes like beer" and I need to try the rest to see which ones they really nail off any.

[@CraftComputing]

Like I said, I was definitely being overly critical because of the claims on the can. It's a beer I'd be happy to have after any amount of yard work. It's just not 'what a West coast IPA should taste like'.

[@mncllama]

@@CraftComputing completely agree! Great video as well!

[@Blooest]

I have to be the super pedantic one: "depreciated" and "deprecated" are two very different words.

[@slunce12]

I was just going to write this :D I usually try not to be pedantic about language, but this one is my pet peeve

[@marcogenovesi8570]

YES! Thank you

[@isaackvasager9957]

I'm dumb...can you explain the difference?

[@Blooest]

@@isaackvasager9957 Deprecation (no i) in programming is the act of no longer using or developing something. Depreciation is a reduction in value or belittling of something. Microsoft isn't depreciating the newer version of SNMP, they're just not using it going forward. They're deprecating usage of SNMP in favor of WMI.

[@isaackvasager9957]

@@Blooest gotcha, thank you.

[@gbrown7911]

Loved the run down of Observium… you had the beer sitting there and I didn’t even realize it was Big Ditch. Buffalo guy here so like my eyes perked up when you said it. Never tried that one but Big Ditch is known in Buffalo for Hayburner for IPA’s. Past the season now but for fall there Cinnamon Apple Amber Ale is outstanding.

[@OlafBerserker624]

Another +1 for the Hayburners!! (Full disclaimer, another Buffalo guy here too...)

[@dennissmithjr.5370]

Thanks for the video, love the Defiant wallpaper.

[@thatLion01]

Thanks for sharing linode with us

[@psyedk]

that T-Shirt is 10/10

[@PMEP12]

I think it would be useful to see a walk through of the Observium and features of it

[@ENG-SaMoR]

sir please can you make a video about How to configure 1 minute polling on Observium to send up/down alert fast thank you

[@Shadow_Beatz]

Great tutorial! You've got a new subscriber!

[@ferencgaborsimon245]

Bonus points for the Defiant wallpaper!

[@christhompson9251]

Apparently the Craft Computing secret lair is on the island of San Miguel off the coast of Portugal.

[@CraftComputing]

....You got me.

[@richardvanorsouw9642]

Thanks, have been looking for something like this!!

[@Richard25000]

Fun fact I used to work at an ISP after the creator of observium and worked there. So we had a very very early version installed.

[@seansrightthere]

Hell yeah! Thanks! I thought they'd sunset on Observium, but glad a video is made!

[@andypippin7148]

Gotta admit, I love the shirt.

[@dafydds]

Thanks for this, I did watch your video some time ago, but only got around to trying this software recently. Thank-you! I've used a number of enterprise packages professionally, but this product just makes things so much easier for my home network. Don't get me wrong, I've tried a few home-lab packages, but they all just turned into an Admin mess, so this ticks all the boxes for me.

[@DigitalHi5]

Ohhh Big Ditch. I've been to their brewery, good beers there!

[@shawnmccloskey4859]

Did anybody else try this script, it has been painful for me, still trying to get a running instance. UPDATE1: Ubuntu 20.04 is terrible, 18.04, works like butter UPDATE2: Observium Rocks!! Thanks for bringing this to us Jeff!!

[@AdamArmstrong]

18.04 might drop off our minimum versions at some point soon. 20.04 should work fine, what issues did you have?

[@peterpetersen6024]

Would be nice to see how to setup service-admin-groups and automatic warning/alarm mails on failure.

[@petesengstock]

Shoutout for Zabbix. Would love to see Jeff do a video on that.

[@Yamitz135]

I’d love to see more about how to troubleshoot network issues. Like when a switch seems to be randomly eating packets. When I started having this issue recently I had literally no idea where to start other than moving Ethernet cables around to identify it was definitely the switch.

[@hawolex2341]

Hello. Perfect start to the week

[@nicholasmccall5043]

Great video - I do this for a living. Used a handful of different enterprise monitoring solutions over the past few years. This free solution looks pretty robust though.

[@JustSomeGuy009]

Outside of network devices I've never been a fan of SNMP. Was actually offered a job at a big tech company that made a software build around SNMP for monitoring data centers for large clients. Decided not to take that job and a few years later they let a lot of people go along with a number of other companies that were in that industry. IMO stuff like elastic search, Prometheus (favorite for metrics), Elasticsearch w/ beats, influxDB, Graphite, or other time series database (TSDB) solution.

[@MeilleureVie2024]

Thanks Jeff! Can't wait for the Proxmox integration of Observium as I get an error when restarting the snmpd service 🙂 Edit : Got it working!

[@Vash612584]

You should make a video on setting WDS up. That and SCCM if you use it. I learn much more from your videos than any others I find on the topic at hand.

[@CraftComputing]

I have a pair of WDS videos. Looking at writing a new one for Windows 11, but it's going to be a while out. They changed a lot of things and haven't yet released documentation.

[@Joshv918]

Auto discovery is a main concern of mine. I was wondering if there is a more in depth video you could do about that. How to properly setup the config.php file and discovery.php -h commands

[@paubal1212]

Nice moment to post this video. I can use it for my homework for Wednesday hahha

[@DodgeHooker641]

Do you have a current video of all the various software and services that you have running, along with a brief description of why and what it does

[@revealingfacts4all]

Long time Nagios user .. will give Observium a close look.

[@ArindamGhoshal]

Wow, great t-shirt.

[@arkdivision7253]

Great tutorial, can you give an example of what the config should look like filled out for wmi, I'm getting access denied but if I test wmic on a windows device the credentials work.

[@ruegore]

Where did you get that shirt? I'd love to buy one like it as a gift for my brother.

[@magnusnelenius649]

I have some rasperry pi's and NAS's that I would like to monitor. There is a comment that observian bogged down a pi4 but if a run observian on a more poweful machine, can I then monitor the rasperries (mostly rpi3, rpi4) without slowing them down?

[@ewoks42]

@CraftComputing why you prefer full VM over containers?

[@josephwiewel325]

I am trying to install this on a VM using your guide. I keep getting an "error: invalid option" after "Creating Observium dir"

[@Grid21]

Can you use Obervium on Windows 10 devices? I have quite a few Desktop Windows devices and it'd be nice to monitor them like you do Windows Servers.

[@brenthoadley]

Awesome shirt 👍

[@davidnaumann8086]

Worried about the security of snmpv2 but accepts MD5 no questions asked. SMH.

[@SD_7878]

Is there a way to get all the data which observium is grabbing? I don't know if API will work and do I need to configure Observium to allow API authentication.

[@SuphaFlyy]

Holly shit.... when you opened that home page the map is showing my town.... Freaky stuff man 🤨🤨

[@PaulBunkey]

Can this program scan a VMWare host and automatically add any VM it finds there?

[@bradeinarsen]

watching this video I feel like I'm learning a new language by watching a TV channel in that language... I run all Windows servers at home (shared drives) and have run Linux servers but only for sendmail in 2001. have the server room itch!

[@nikschlein9239]

Maybe I missed it, but once you have installed WMIC on the observium server, how do you add WMI client machines?

[@Learethak]

As far as I can tell in my digging (and replicating this setup) you can't. It looks like observium does SNMP or SNMP + WMI. Even according to Observium's documentation WMI is just for getting more granularity from windows services like exchange and SQL and I can't find anywhere where it says it natively support WMI only. After several re-watches the video he only enables WMI on an already added machine. I wasted 2 days setting , but learned a lot about getting WMI to report correctly from my servers, so I consider it a net win.

Nailed it with that Shirt!

[@Grid21]

Observium work with TrueNAS that I could use my Windows 10 machine to monitor what my TrueNAS server is doing?

[@Napert]

"let's just throw in 6 high performance cpu cores and 8gb of ram to a vm that will use less than 10% of these resources" meanwhile my homelab has 4 weak threads and 8gb ram total

[@marcogenovesi8570]

on the positive side, your homelab is much more efficient

[@sabahawni7982]

Does Observium monitor the Windows application by using either SNMP or WMI?

[@imedjendoubi6401]

Love the content, keep it up!

[@Imnotimportant555]

Hi Jeff, I followed your guide and installed Ubuntu Server 20.04 and used the script like you did in your video. I am at the part where I am attempting to install the wmi plugin and fix the dependencies for it but once I do that systems stop polling. Looking into it when installing the two deb files it changes the python version from 3 to 2 and this causes the polling script to not be happy and say it is missing dependencies. Does this happen for you and if so how did you fix it?

[@DigitalHi5]

Came here because of this..

[@ArnaudFortier]

I use observium and I agree it's very nice. However monitoring more in depth things like services/program/link to external machines doesn't seem to be user-friendly. Do you have examples? I'm trying check-mk which is also very nice.

[@b5fie]

CheckMk / OMD can be dauthing to begin to use; but as a professional I must admit I love it :) Use it a work monitoring a 849 hosts 27125 services; use it a home monitoring 19 hosts 164 services :-D

[@angelfeliciano8794]

Amazing video. Could you create one explaining how to create email alerts for device offline, high cpu, network overload , etc ?

[@MrDivision89]

Solid tutorial

[@Cinderz88]

Loved this but learned the hard way to install SNMPD service on the linux first as Obersvium wouldn't pick them up. Honestly thinking this will replace PRTG for my network monitor. Internally only of course.

[@maxcobar4446]

Sadly configuring WMI to use a Local User Account breaks the whole WMI integration it has with Observium, insofar I haven't yet found a way to run it using a non-domain account without a WMI domain or WMI hostname.

[@maynardcrow6447]

hey Jeff I just got a Tesla m40. I studied everything but always seemed to the "4g decoding" thing. do you know if those x79 Chinese boards have 4g docoding. I was trying it on my b85 board with e3 1245 v4. No luck. The only lga 1150 boards I've researched are a couple Asus z97 boards.

[@hoodwink55]

What's the make and model number of that trackball you're using?

[@CraftComputing]

That is the Elecom HUGE. I've got a review of it on the channel.

[@MeatPoPsiclez]

I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences with SIEM solutions, and whether any open source solution can be practical or provides a full toolset (asset detection, threat detection and mitigation)

[@JustSomeGuy009]

Elasticsearch based solutions. Elastic has their own stuff. SecurityOnion. HELK. And so on.

[@ishan.1832]

Hey craft computing, Should i flash my gpu’s bios if my csm support cant stay disabled ?

[@thethault]

I’d love a comparison to the TIG stack.

[@LL-ck4ei]

It's SNMP secure ? I remember like 12 years ago we disabled all ok the office for safety reasons ...

[@priyasharma-ii9zt]

Hey,,, How to check OPTICAL POWER in observium

[@MohitSharma-bg8il]

in my observium, graph unable to generate.. please help

[@Wolfennar]

Is there any reason to use md5 as auth algo? At a quick glance that sounds like a terrible idea

[@hawwestin]

Personally I prefer metricbeats and elastic for webapps and hosting monitoring. But this is interesting approach ...lower level data I think for network guys maybe appreciated

[@JustSomeGuy009]

Observium and SNMP is only really common in Network gear. Usefulness is pretty limited tbh. Span ports with netflow and other stuff like that are way better. Combine with tools like Bro and elastic stacks (like SecurityOnion). For metrics Elastic+beats are pretty darn good. Personally prefer Prometheus for TSDB stuff but would not object to elastic it tuned right.

[@W1nTry]

That T-shirt is winning, where can I grab one?

[@jpconstantineau]

Love the Shirt.

[@ArneiroS]

What sets Observium apart from Zabbix?

[@WillFuI]

Where are the chapters? I love chapters

[@IvarBredesen]

That t-shirt is 🔥🔥🔥 Where did you buy it? 🤩

[@hillonetwork]

this will work over VPN for remote PC and antenas? tnx

[@ndb5348]

For some reason my snmpd config file is totally different than yours. It only has 7 lines.

[@ndb5348]

I figured it out. Observium wants to install snmpd for you. When doing this it overwrites the config file. Select N when it asks to install and manually install snmpd after.

[@ndb5348]

Nvm this still doesn't work correctly.

[@costa404]

@@ndb5348 I've run into the same issue. Looks totally different. are you to edit the snmp.conf on the Observium server? or the device being monitored?

[@haydenc2742]

Awesome! I can tell you it will work on a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, have configured 9 devices..but BOY HOWDY does it bog it down! Definitely think this is for beefier machines But it does work...even got it to connect to my pfSense machine on the LAN port of course :)

[@dcvamps4594]

How bad is the bog down? I've been needing to condense my server down to a lower powered solution since I moved into an apartment. I was going to migrate most of my services to a collection of clustered Raspberry Pi 3B+

[@AdamArmstrong]

It shouldn't really be slow on a PI4, what storage are you using? The database will be practically empty with 9 devices. Is the slowdown all the time, or intermittent? If it's the latter, you can probably just reduce the number of poller threads. We assume a faster system so default to 2x as many threads as cores, so yours will be trying to poll 8 devices simultaneously. 1 or 2 threads would be better to spread the load over a longer period. It's also quite i/o dependent, so make sure the SD is a good one.

[@haydenc2742]

@@dcvamps4594 When it starts polling and generating webpages it kicked usage up to 5.20+ and bogs it down...even had it self reboot a few times it got bogged down so hard...ended up moving it to an i5 system w/ 16 GB RAM to get it to run well, polling seems to take ALOT of resources, especially if you have multiple machines you are monitoring It does calm down...but with it polling at approx 5min intervals it keeps it bogged way down

[@haydenc2742]

@@AdamArmstrong I have it in a DeskPi Pro case with a NVME M.2 to SATA adapter and it still bogged it down (even thru the USB3 connection)

[@AdamArmstrong]

@@haydenc2742 oof. That should easily have enough cpu and io to handle that small install. Do those devices have lots of ports? Try reducing the number of poller threads in the web config.

[@neverthere5689]

Is winrm the same as wmi? At work I use tools that require winrm config B4 it can collect windows metrics

[@neverthere5689]

And is dcom older winrm? Lol so many questions

[@Royaleah]

Why do just the update and not the upgrade?

[@stephenreaves3205]

11:45 DEPRECATED, not depreciated. On of my biggest pet peeves. (I still love you though)

[@DaveBoxBG]

Is this better or Nagios?

[@hjames27]

Install script does not seem to support 21.10?

[@SavannahTL]

how about a video on Syslog server? What do you recommended, free is best lol

[@Kellen81]

The SNMP/WMI info was nice but you didn't really show much about what Observium looks like or what it can do, so I'd say the title was a little misleading.

[@wwardak]

Great video as usual! Can you do a tutorial for phpIPAM with SSL? Thanks!

[@GrishTech]

This vs zabbix?

[@tommsla123]

Observium is cool but I can't get "The top 10 bandwith usage" on it

[@alphazed4237]

can we start rating these 1-10 no rookie scores (decimals only)

[@hobgobbling]

pondered my orb to this

[@Patrick_McFadin]

Nobody is going to talk about how that shirt isn't on the craft computing store???

[@rek410]

Observium vs CheckMK .... who wins?