126 Chapter 7. Monitoring
of its CPU used,and the WARNING threshold is set to 70percent, the probe will go into a WARNING
state. Some probes offer a multitude of such thresholds.
In order to get the most out of your Monitoring entitlement and avoid false notifications, Red Hat
recommends running your probes without notifications for a time to establish baseline performance
for each of your systems. Although the default values provided for probes may suit you, every orga-
nization has a different environment that may require altering thresholds.
7.4.3. Monitoring the RHN Server
In addition to monitoring all of your client systems, you may also use RHN to monitor your RHN
Server itself, whether that be an RHN Satellite Server an RHN Proxy Server or both. To monitor your
RHN Server, find asystem monitored by the server, and goto that system’s System Details
Probes
tab.
Click create new probe and select the Satellite Probe Command Group. Then complete the
remaining fields as you would for any other probe. Refer to Section 7.4.1 Managing Probes for in-
structions.
Although the RHN Server will appear to be monitored by the client system, the probe will actually be
run from the server on itself. Thresholds and notifications will work normally.
7.5. Troubleshooting
Though all Monitoring-related activities are conducted through the RHN website, Red Hat provides
access to some command line diagnostic tools that may help you determine the cause of errors. To
use these tools, you must be able to become the nocpulse user on the RHN Server conducting the
monitoring.
First log into the RHN Server as root. Then switch to the nocpulse user with the following com-
mand:
su - nocpulse
You may now use the diagnostic tools described within the rest of this section.
7.5.1. Examining Probes with rhn-catalog
To thoroughly troubleshoot a probe, you must first obtain its probe ID. You may get this by running
rhn-catalog on the RHN Server as the nocpulse user. The output will resemble:
2 ServiceProbe on example1.redhat.com (199.168.36.245): test 2
3 ServiceProbe on example2.redhat.com (199.168.36.173): rhel2.1 test
4 ServiceProbe on example3.redhat.com (199.168.36.174): SSH
5 ServiceProbe on example4.redhat.com (199.168.36.175): HTTP
The probe ID is the first number in the line, while the probe name (as entered in the RHN website) is
the final entry on the line. For example, the 5 probe ID corresponds to the probe named HTTP.
Further, you may pass the --commandline (-c) and --dump (-d) options along with a probe ID to
rhn-catalog to obtain additional details about the probe, like so:
rhn-catalog --commandline --dump 5
The --commandline option yields the command parameters set for the probe, while --dump re-
trieves everything else, including alert thresholds and notification intervals and methods.
