Introduction to OS Service monitoring

Introduction

User permissions for OS Service monitoring

OS Service Management page

OS Services dashboard

OS Services dashlet

Monitoring OS Services through View-based profiles

RESTful API

Introduction:

Entuity's OS Service monitoring includes monitoring of selected services. From Entuity v20.0 P03 upwards, this monitoring has been extended to the following:

• systemd services for supported Linux
• Windows service support
• Service Management Facility (SMF) services for supported Solaris operating systems (from Entuity v23.0 upwards)
• Subsystems for supported IBM i operating systems (from Entuity v23.0 P01 upwards)

In Entuity, these are referred to as 'OS Services' to differentiate them from the separate Entuity services concept.

User permissions for OS Service monitoring:

Only Administrators have access to the OS Service Management page, and the ability to view and edit OS Service rules.

All users are able to view the resulting OS Services attributes and events.

Note regarding non-admin user access to individual OS services being monitored:

Entuity OS Service monitoring populates Service State and Service Status information for each OS Service. If a non-admin user has normal (basic) 'Read' permissions for an OS service, then Entuity will be able to see the service and correctly populate the data.

For Solaris OS Service monitoring (from Entuity v23.0 upwards), the user must have 'Read' access under the following directories:

• /usr
• /etc

In addition, if a non-admin user is used for Solaris OS Service monitoring, the user must be assigned the Service Management or Service Operator profile. If profiles aren't used, the user must be assigned the solaris.smf.manage and solaris.smf.modify authorizations. For more information about rights profiles and authorizations, see the documentation for your Solaris server.

OS Service Management page:

The OS Service Management page is used to manage filtering rules for OS Services or Servers. This creates a whitelist for OS Services that will be monitored by Entuity. From this page, you can create, edit and remove service rules. See this article for information on OS Service rules.

To access the OS Service Management page:

1. From the Main Menu, click Administration..
2. In the Polling section of the Administration page, click OS Service Management. 
   This opens the OS Service Management page.

OS Services dashboard:

The OS Services dashboard shows you a list of the OS Services on the selected Windows, Linux, IBM i (from Entuity v23.0 P01 upwards), or Solaris (from Entuity v23.0 upwards) server and provides data about those OS Services.

This dashboard is only applicable to OS servers. See this article for information on the OS Services dashboard.

OS Services dashlet:

The OS Services dashlet displays in a table the OS Services that are being monitored by Entuity, according to the whitelist filters specified in the OS Service Management page.  Clicking the name of an OS Service takes you to the Summary dashboard for that object. See this article for information on the OS Services dashlet.

Monitoring OS Services through View-based profiles:

From Entuity v21.0 P03 upwards, you can create View-based profiles by which you can group together specified behavior and functionality. As applicable to OS Service monitoring, this means you can create a View-based profile that ensures specific OS Services will only run against specified servers.

Please see this article for more information about enabling profiles for OS Service rules.

Example:

In this example, you have a network with 100 servers. 10 of these are internet-facing web servers running Entuity, and are therefore running OS services, such as Tomcat. The other 90 servers do not have webservers running on them. If you create an OS Service to check for the running of Tomcat, incidents and events alerting to 'Tomcat is not running' will be raised on the 90 servers that do not have Tomcat.

From Entuity v21.0 P03 upwards, you can create a View-based profile that ensures specific OS Services run only against the servers containing the relevant webservers:

1. In this example, you have an OS Service called 'Tomcat'. Create two new Views, one called 'Servers' (containing all 100 servers) and the other called 'Webservers' (containing only the 10 webservers).
2. Create a new profile, called 'Web'. Add the 'Webservers' View to this profile, and specify the 'Tomcat' OS Service. This effectively tags the 'Webservers' View with the features, as specified by the 'Web' profile.
3. Specify the 'Tomcat' OS Service to run only against Views that are tagged by the 'Web' profile. This means that the 'Tomcat' OS Service will not run against the other 90 non-webservers.

A device, such as a database webserver, can be in two or more different Views, and therefore can be in two or more different profiles.

RESTful API:

Please see the following for information on monitoring OS Services using the Entuity RESTful API:

• List all OS Service rules, create a new rule or delete all rules.
• List, update or delete an OS Service rule.