Introduction

Today we will be installing Observium
Observium is a Network Management and Monitoring System that collects data from multiple devices using SNMP and allows you to monitor all of the networks devices via an easy to use interface. It is PHP-based and uses a MySQL database to store data.

Note

This guide works with Ubuntu 16.04

Install

Connect to your server via SSH

ssh [email protected]

Install Dependencies

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-cli php7.0-mysql php7.0-mysqli php7.0-gd php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-json php-pear snmp fping mysql-server mysql-client python-mysqldb rrdtool subversion whois mtr-tiny ipmitool graphviz imagemagick apache2

Enter the Mysql password for the root user. Note: For security make this one different than your server's password, and try not to use this user in any application that requires a database to store and pull data from.

MySQL

Download and Extract Observium

sudo mkdir -p /opt/observium
cd /opt
sudo wget http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz
sudo tar zxvf observium-community-latest.tar.gz

Configuration

create the MYSQL database and user

Enter your MySQL password that you gave the root user from before

mysql -u root -p

Once in MySQL enter the following commands to create the database, the user and to allow the user access to the database.

CREATE DATABASE observium DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Make sure to change the Observium database password with your own, you will need this in the next step.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON observium.* TO 'observium'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'dbpassword';

exit

 

 

Changing the config file

cd observium
sudo cp config.php.default config.php

Change the setting on the config.php to reflect your systems settings

sudo nano config.php

Set the username and password on the observium config file and an email address for alerts to get sent to.

<?php

## Check http://www.observium.org/docs/config_options/ for documentation of possible settings

// Database config ---  This MUST be configured
$config['db_extension'] = 'mysqli';
$config['db_host']      = 'localhost';
$config['db_user']      = 'observium';
$config['db_pass']      = 'dbpassword';
$config['db_name']      = 'observium';

// Base directory
#$config['install_dir'] = "/opt/observium";

// Default community list to use when adding/discovering
$config['snmp']['community'] = array("public");

// Authentication Model
$config['auth_mechanism'] = "mysql";    // default, other options: ldap, http-auth, please see documentation for config help

// Enable alerter
$config['poller-wrapper']['alerter'] = TRUE;

//$config['web_show_disabled'] = FALSE;    // Show or not disabled devices on major pages.

// Set up a default alerter (email to a single address)
$config['email']['default']        = "[email protected]";
$config['email']['from']           = "Observium <[email protected]>";
$config['email']['default_only']   = TRUE;

// End config.php

Control +X to write file in nano.
Give Apache user www-data ownership of the Observium web files

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/observium/html/

Run this script to Setup the MySQL database and insert the default schema:

./discovery.php -u

Create required directories

Directory where logs are stored 
sudo mkdir logs
Directory for the round-robin database 
 sudo mkdir rrd
Give the apache user and group ownership of the directory 
sudo chown www-data:www-data rrd

Configuring Apache web server

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
Make the file look like this ```apache ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /opt/observium/html Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Require all granted ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined ServerSignature On ``` Enable php mcrypt module: 
sudo phpenmod mcrypt
Enable mod_rewrite for Observium's cleaner URLs: 
sudo a2enmod rewrite
Last but not least we enable PHP and switch to mpm_prefork 
sudo a2dismod mpm_event
sudo a2enmod mpm_prefork
sudo a2enmod php7.0
Restart Apache 
sudo service apache2 restart

Getting Started

Adding an Admin User 
./adduser.php admin password 10
Adding your First SNMP enabled device to monitor 
./add_device.php <hostname> <community> v2c
Note: if your internal network can't resolve hostnames, add them to your hosts file. Also make sure that the devices you are monitoring support SNMP or you will not be able to add them, also if your device supports sending logs to a syslog server point it to the Observium IP.

Adding the cron jobs

Create this cron file

sudo nano /etc/cron.d/observium

Add the following content inside. these jobs are required by Observium for Polling and Discovering Devices

# Run a complete discovery of all devices once every 6 hours
33  */6   * * *   root    /opt/observium/discovery.php -h all >> /dev/null 2>&1

# Run automated discovery of newly added devices every 5 minutes
*/5 *     * * *   root    /opt/observium/discovery.php -h new >> /dev/null 2>&1

# Run multithreaded poller wrapper every 5 minutes
*/5 *     * * *   root    /opt/observium/poller-wrapper.py 4 >> /dev/null 2>&1

# Run housekeeping script daily for syslog, eventlog and alert log
13 5 * * * root /opt/observium/housekeeping.php -ysel >> /dev/null 2>&1

# Run housekeeping script daily for rrds, ports, orphaned entries in the database and performance data
47 4 * * * root /opt/observium/housekeeping.php -yrptb >> /dev/null 2>&1

Finally Grant correct permissions to fping to fix unable to ping error

chmod +s /usr/bin/fping

That's It

Open The panel and Login with the password you set earlier

http://Server-IP