Monitoring few pfsense boxes
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Hi Everyone,
What is a great tool to use to monitor 5 pfSense boxes scattered all over across the internet? I would be great to monitor internet uptime, bandwidth, rrd graphs, and some error or other logs.
All the pfSense boxes use OpenVPN to connect to a server so it would be great to be able to see the OpenVPN interface monitored as well.
The collector tool I am looking for will show me overall state of all the boxes (in one page maybe?) every morning when I wake up to give me peace of mind.
Do you have a collection of scripts for this? or do you use any available packages?
Thanks,
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A number of people have asked for something similar. A sufficient number, in fact, that I know at one time the developers were working on something. They revealed almost nothing about it at the time and I haven't heard anything for over a year so I wouldn't hold your breath!
I believe there are some open source server monitoring tools that can be made to work though I've never tried it.
Steve
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Yeah, I remember that. I can't wait any longer though. I can settle for something simple. This doesn't have to be complicated. I have VPN connections already. I can probably get few script together.
Thanks
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Did you tried nagios + nrpe package????
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In general, people use whatever general monitoring system they have deployed to monitor their servers and other network infrastructure. All the major monitoring suites can monitor FreeBSD, and most allow for some customization to get more specific things if you want to go beyond what your system offers in general. We have packages for Zabbix and Nagios NRPE too, though people use a wide range of things outside of those two.
We will have a product offering out sometime in 2013 that offers more and better than anything else can without extensive customization.
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Looking forward to that. Thanks for the update. :)
Steve
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I've been using OpenNMS to monitor pfSense. It's as simple as enabling the SNMP service and setting it up. You won't get the RRD graphs but you can customize SNMP to grab most everything else. The "out of the box" SNMP settings in pfSense do a really good job with an "out of the box" OpenNMS setup.
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Thank for all the good feedback. Nagios seems like an overkill and it's too bloated for me at this point.
I would like to try OpenNMS. However, it would be much better if I can get an RRD graph. RRD Graph would mean that I can keep logs forever on an off-site server and have an admin watch over the overall network activity without having to login to pfSense.
Any solution for RRD Graphs?
Also, do I have to install a package on pfSense to get messages to OpenNMS server?
Thanks
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The "messages" that you are refering are called traps , that are sent by pfsense when something changes , usually a link down , or other bad stuff. you can enable this by going to Services–>SNMP Traps and hit enable on the check box , you also need to set the ip of the Open Nms box/host so pfsense knows where to send the traps when something happens.
Ofc, in order to send the traps conectivity between pfsense and Open Nms must ok.
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Nagios seems like an overkill and it's too bloated for me at this point.
I would like to try OpenNMS.
scratches head Between those, if anything is bloated, it's OpenNMS. :) Functionality-wise, Nagios probably a bit less feature-ful than OpenNMS too, so if it's overkill, OpenNMS is even more overkill. But I think either of those would serve you well. Using SNMP and syslog should suffice for OpenNMS so you don't need any add on packages.
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As for RRD graphs you could try using pfflowd, with a netflow protocol converter, but I could'nt get it to work propely with splunk netflow plugin, but i didn't spend much time trying and didn't try any other netflow grapher
From the description of the package :
pfflowd converts OpenBSD PF status messages (sent via the pfsync interface) to Cisco NetFlow datagrams. These datagrams may be sent (via UDP) to a host of one's choice. Utilising the OpenBSD stateful packet filter infrastructure means that flow tracking is very fast and accurate.
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Has there been any development or updates with Pfcenter?
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CMB recently said this:
https://twitter.com/cbuechler/status/340209076099239936So nothing definitive but work still on going. :)
Steve
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Cheers Steve!
