Centreon - Add Host or Router and monitor bandwidth utilization

In this article, We will be walking through the Centreon configuration steps. You will be answered to the following questions while going through this article.

1) What is Centreon?
2) How to add a router/switch/host/server in Centreon?
3) How to monitor a network device's (switch or router) interface bandwidth traffic usage using centreon?
4) How to install Centreon ? Installation steps for Centreon, etc.,
5) Centreon vs nagios, Which is better?

This is basically a Centreon tutorial page for beginners.

What is Centreon?

Centreon is a Automational monitoring system based on Nagios engine. With this great tool you can generate bandwidth reports, availability reports, ping reports, etc.,

Created in 2003, Centreon is an Open Source software package that lets you supervise all the infrastructures and applications comprising your information system.

The only problem i found with this tool is support. You don't get any support, not even a forum or a proper guide for configuration in google. Anyway this page will make you clear on Centreon configurtions.

Here We Begin

For step by step Centreon installation, I recommend you to visit this official page http://documentation.centreon.com/docs/centreon/en/latest/installation/index.html.

Once you have installed your Centreon Monitoring engine, you have got add services and hosts to be monitored. To make you clear, it is not a inventory tool to discover hosts. You have to manually add all the hosts and services for each host.

Basics on Centreon Configuration

I hope you know the way to configure pollers. Pollars are nothing but a server placed on a brach office or someother location from where you are going to monitor the devices. 

Before adding a new host, I recommend you to do the following tasks.As part of this tutorial page, I am going to add a router and monitor bandwidth of one of it's interfaces. For availability you can use ping service. Here I am using Check_centreon_snmp_traffic script. I found this on the following path of my server /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins. I verified the script with the following command.

To know how to use this script/service, check it's man page or help. Give you hostname where i've painted with red and community string in place of blue. You can add your interface name and other information also.

Check_Centreon_SNMP_Traffic

Now I am going to modify the centreon's command page according to my needs. For example Centreon considers public as the community string for snmp protocol. Also has it's default parameters to be considered. So it's better to change the command line as we need.

Refer the below image, I have changed the default arguements. I need only interface name as input. Also graph template has been changed to Traffic as it's going to be a bandwidth monitoring.

Now save this, and add a new host with the following details.

After this stage we can create our service template. Same service template can be used for multiple hosts. Here I have called my check_centreon_traffic command.

I am changing the graph template to Traffic in the below image.

Now you got to map your service template to hosts as below.

For example, I have 5 routers and 3 switches. In my case all these network devices has FastEthernet0/0 interface. So I will create a service for FastEthernet0/0 interface traffic and will map that to all these hosts.

That's over, We have created a RTR host, and mapped service interface traffic to it. Not to forget restart Centreon Nagios in the confiuration tab after doing each and every configuration. Now, you should be able to monitor your bandwidth usage and other things after readind this article.

Please post your doubts in comment box, if any.