Lidl
Retail trade
Business service and system monitoring based on Nagios
As the complexity of modern IT landscapes increases, so do the requirements placed on IT monitoring systems. To ensure that business IT runs without interruption and with the desired performance, far more is needed than an off-the-shelf solution. ConSol accompanies you and your IT department with high-end consulting from conception to implementation and efficient operation of globally distributed monitoring platforms.
In the open source monitoring environment around Nagios, Icinga, OMD, Prometheus and Thruk, ConSol has been a household name for many years, still involved in the further development of the open source frameworks. Whether your business is an SME or a large corporation, we will support you with many years of experience and best practices according to your needs. Our portfolio ranges from single workshops to operating or hosting of customized monitoring systems.
Monitoring: Our Holistic Approach
Open Source
Save license costs for commercial systems! We support you with migrating your IT monitoring to Nagios, Naemon or Icinga.
Cloud Integration
With Prometheus, you can securely monitor Openshift or Kubernetes clusters and integrate them into your process landscape as well as your existing monitoring.
Customer Perspective
With end-to-end monitoring (Web and GUI), you can eliminate customer-relevant faults in critical applications at an early stage, before they affect the user.
Know-how
We offer training courses and workshops on all tools and techniques in use as well as on special topics – on-site if you wish.
IT Monitoring Services
Whether hosting, operation, or support – no problem: Use our IT services according to the modular principle, available also 24/7.
Optimization
We analyze existing Nagios, Naemon or Icinga installations and point out useful or necessary adjustments.
Development
We already know many heterogeneous customer environments and IT infrastructures which allows us to develop new plugins for your specific IT components.
Architecture
We only use the modules that fit your needs best to create your individual IT monitoring architecture.
Security
On request, we host your monitoring platform in our Munich data center, certified according to ISO 27001 for information security.
Complex Requirements – Tailored Solutions
Some of our open-soure monitoring customer stories
pbb Deutsche Pfandbriefbank
Industry: Finance
End-to-End Application Monitoring
it@M, central IT service provider for the City of Munich
Public Administration
Open Source Monitoring with OMD
M-net
Telecommunications
Future-proof IT monitoring on Nagios basis
Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians of Lower Saxony (KVN)
Public Administration
Complete IT monitoring of the server landscape
... more stories
Open Source Monitoring: Our Devices & Tools
OMD is a comprehensive open source monitoring solution bundling out-of-the-box Cores Nagios, Naemon and Icinga with their most useful add-ons into a complete package. A revolutionary site concept allows for parallel operation of several fully-fledged installations on one single server. The update effort for a complete Nagios installation using OMD is minimal. ConSol employees Sven Nierlein and Gerhard Laußer have been members of the OMD development team omdistro.org from the very beginning. At ConSol, we prefer the Open Monitoring Distribution Labs Edition as proven basis for Nagios installations.
The Mod-Gearman module developed by ConSol enables the distributed execution of several thousand checks and event handlers per minute. They are no longer executed "classically" by Nagios itself, but as "jobs" by so-called "workers". The result is being encrypted and sent back to Nagios.
Thruk is a modern web interface for Nagios that is also compatible with Icinga and Icinga 2. Sven Nierlein of ConSol developed it because the classic web interface of Nagios had been hardly further developed for several years and therefor had no longer met the requirements of modern open source monitoring. Thruk makes life easier for the monitoring administrator with a host of additional features and useful aids, among them powerful dashboards. Globally distributed IT monitoring landscapes consisting of hundreds of instances can be easily operated with the help of Thruk.
SNClient+ is an up-to-date monitoring agent for Windows and Unix systems, developed by Sven Nierlein. This agent fixes SSL cipher problems that have made the operation of similar products risky for years. In addition to a strong emphasis on slimness and maintainability of the code, care was also taken to adopt familiar functions of the established NSClient++. The migration from NSClient++ to SNClient+ is seamless, without the need to adapt existing configuration files. A special highlight is the integration of Mod-Gearman, which enables a continuous flow of check jobs and results via a queue, thus considerably relieving the monitoring servers.
The Coshsh framework by Gerhard Laußer automatically generates the configuration files for Nagios-based IT monitoring systems. Necessary information about servers and applications as well as their contact persons and dependencies are read from any data source and converted into host, service and contact definitions. Advantage: Inventory data only need to be maintained by the server and application managers.
The IT monitoring newcomer Prometheus is already the de facto standard for monitoring Kubernetes and OpenShift environments. But Prometheus can also play to its strengths in the monitoring of network devices, for example. To be able to monitor applications and systems in detail, the tool records and evaluates metrics. It thereby, among other things, also allows for designing complex alerts. For long-term storage of extremely large time series data sets (>= Tera Byte) with high cardinality, we use Thanos (optimized for infinite quantities, e.g. via S3 storage) and VictoriaMetrics (optimized for performance).
The classic Nagios and its successors Naemon and Icinga / Incinga 2 form the core of open source IT monitoring. All three have been in use for many years and have proven themselves extremely well both in smaller projects and in globally distributed IT monitoring landscapes.
The performance data for classic IT monitoring adds up to a considerable amount of data. We store this data in the time-series database InfluxDBto save space. And the visualization tool Grafana creates clear dashboards from this data.
Ansible has become an integral part of the architecture of complex system landscapes. The automation tool helps to orchestrate servers and many other devices. Ansible helps to define desired system states easily and reusable.
Grafana has quickly become the most popular tool for displaying graphs and dashboards. It can be connected to a variety of data sources, including Prometheus and InfluxDB, but also to classic databases such as MySQL or Microsoft SQL. Grafana not only helps to visualize the recorded metrics, but also helps to better understand them, making this tool indispensable in heterogeneous IT monitoring landscapes.
ConSol has developed Nagios plug-ins for the four most common databases Oracle, MySQL, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server. The plug-ins are state-of-the-art for uniform IT monitoring of a heterogeneous database landscape on an open source basis.
More than
200 customers
trust ConSol for their IT & software
Open Source Monitoring: Monitoring on Road
Sven Nierlein at FOSDEM 2021: Monitoring Large Networks with Naemon, Thruk, Mod-Gearman and LMD
The focus is on the challenges of global monitoring - because for growing, globally active companies, network monitoring must also grow with them. In the talk a scaling Naemon setup will be shown - what can go wrong, how can you counter this? In addition, there will be an introduction to the tools Thruk, Mod-Gearman and LMD.
Sven Nierlein at OSMC 2019: Naemon and Friends
Naemon is the engine of several opensource monitoring solutions. This talk will take a look at what’s new in and around Naemon. It will try to answer questions like, what is a NEB module and what can it do for me? What are common addons and tools used together with Naemon. While investigating some interesing scenarios there will be shared some best practices.
Ulrike Klusik at OSMC 2019: Monitoring Cockpit for Kubernetes Clusters
Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters with Prometheus is state of the art. The difficulty is to find the significant metrics from the vast amount of available metrics. This talk shows a Monitoring Cockpit defined to get a quick overview of the cluster health and usage. It uses the Standard Metrics available for Kubernetes/OpenShift Clusters and their standard services.
Sven Nierlein at OSMC 2018: Thruk 2½ – Current state of development
Thruk is a modern web interface for Nagios that is also compatible with Icinga and Icinga 2. In his presentation at OSMC 2018 Sven Nierlein of ConSol introduces the development milestones such as dashboards, the business process plugin as well as additional functions and useful aids, making monitoring administrators’ life easier.
Matthias Gallinger at OSMC 2018: Monitoring based on Prometheus
In his talk at OMD 2018 Matthias Gallinger answers questions about Prometheus and Grafana: How can metrics be collected and processed via SNMP, how could Grafana easily visualize a large number of network ports and is there a way to collect ad hoc metrics for troubleshooting? At the same time, the requirements for implementing SNMP are discussed.
Tobias Kempf & Michael Kraus at OSMC 2017: Highly automated logistics monitoring
Tobias Kempf and Michael Kraus present the highly automated logistics monitoring project based on OMD at Europe's largest retail company. It consists of more than 200 cascaded and self-sufficient instances, which provide administrators on site and at headquarters with valuable information about their infrastructure and reporting data.
Contact
Gerhard Laußer
+49-89-45841-100