About GDMA

GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agent

The GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agent (GDMA) was developed primarily as a scaling method for GroundWork Monitor installations. In simple terms, it is an agent that runs independently of the Nagios scheduler in GroundWork Monitor, and forwards the state of the monitored services on individual nodes to the GroundWork server using the NSCA protocol. The Nagios instance in GroundWork Monitor processes these results as passive checks. The configuration information for which services to run on which hosts, the monitoring thresholds, frequency, etc., are hosted on the GroundWork server with http or https, and are retrieved by the GDMAs. GDMAs can send results to multiple GroundWork servers, but can pull configuration data from only one source.

Changes from previous versions
  • Automatic plugin downloads
  • Threshold controls for Poller failure messages
  • Toggles for the generation of Poller and Spooler status messages
  • Support for fully qualified host names
  • Support for checking multiple hosts from a single Linux GDMA host
  • Support for 64-bit Powershell plugins in Windows GDMA
Setup and Configuration

If you are new to GDMA, you can use the GDMA Quick Start Guide to get set up. In that section, you will perform the steps necessary to configure an existing GroundWork server to support GDMA agents, and install and configure the agent on Linux and Windows hosts. Solaris installations are similar to Linux, with the exception of the location of the agent directories and certain paths. Once you have the basic install working, you can then refer to the GDMA Advanced Features section to see how to customize the configuration of GDMA to meet your needs. If you are an old hand at GDMA, you will find information in the GDMA Advanced Features section that will be useful in upgrading and making use of new features.

Getting Started

GDMAs are lightweight, independent scheduler daemons for Linux, Windows and Solaris systems, combined with compiled Nagios plugins for the specific operating systems. They are packaged into easily-installed, self-contained agent bundles and are included with the GroundWork installation.

You may download the GDMAs from the GroundWork server at the following base URL:

http://<groundwork_server>/agents/

The packages available are as follows:

  • Windows GDMA
  • Linux 32-bit GDMA
  • Linux 64-bit GDMA
  • Solaris Intel GDMA
  • Solaris SPARC GDMA

Please see a directory listing for the specific package name.

Browsing this URL is disabled by default.

To enable browsing of this directory, edit the file:

/usr/local/groundwork/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

Add the following lines:

<Directory /usr/local/groundwork/apache2/htdocs/agents>
Options Indexes
</Directory>

Save the file and restart apache:

/etc/init.d/groundwork restart apache

In general, the administrator should begin by configuring the target GroundWork server for the common requirements, then move on to configure it one of the agent types, either Windows GDMA, Solaris, or Linux GDMA. Once one agent type is configured and working, it will be relatively easy to add a second agent type. See the GDMA Quick Start section.

This section covers:
  • Quick Start Guide
  • GDMA Advanced
  • Configuration Reference
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