Quickstart

This section will show you the basic configuration you need for your monitoring system.

Advice for Beginners

Congratulations on choosing Centreon Engine! Centreon Engine is quite powerful and flexible, but it can take a lot of work to get it configured just the way you’d like. Once you become familiar with how it works and what it can do for you, you’ll never want to be without it. Here are some important things to keep in mind for first-time Centreon Engine users:

  • Centreon Engine relies on configuration files that might are difficult to write and maintain by hand. You might want to use a frontend to configure Centreon Engine like Centreon. Centreon can help you get your IT network monitored in very few time and provide much more feature to Centreon Engine.

  • Relax - it’s going to take some time. Don’t expect to be able to get things working exactly the way you want them right off the bat. It’s not that easy. Setting up Centreon Engine can involve a bit of work, partly because of the options that Centreon Engine offers, partly because you need to know what to monitor on your network (and how best to do it).

  • The quickstart installation guide is designed to get most new users up and running with a basic Centreon Engine setup fairly quickly. Within 20 minutes you can have Centreon Engine installed and monitoring your local system. Once that’s complete, you can move on to learning how to configure Centreon Engine to do more.

  • Centreon Engine can be tricky to configure when you’ve got a good grasp of what’s going on, and nearly impossible if you don’t. Make sure you read the documentation (particularly the sections on Configuring Centreon Engine). Save the advanced topics for when you’ve got a good understanding of the basics.

  • If you’ve read the documentation, reviewed the sample config files, and are still having problems, send an email message describing your problems to the Centreon Engine mailing list. If you’ve done some background reading and you provide a good problem description, odds are that someone will give you some pointers on getting things working properly.

Post-Installation Modifications

Once you get Centreon Engine installed and running properly, you’ll no doubt want to start monitoring more than just your local machine. Check out the following docs for how to go about monitoring other things:

What You’ll End Up With

  • Centreon Engine will be installed underneath /usr/sbin/.

  • Centreon Engine will be configured to monitor a few aspects of your local system (CPU load, disk usage, etc.).

Customize Configuration

Sample configuration files have now been installed in the /etc/centreon-engine/ directory. These sample files should work fine for getting started with Centreon Engine. You’ll need to make just one change before you proceed …

Edit the /etc/centreon-engine/objects/contacts.cfg config file with your favorite editor and change the email address associated with the centengineadmin contact definition to the address you’d like to use for receiving alerts:

$ vi /etc/centreon-engine/objects/contacts.cfg

Other Modifications

Configuring email notifications is out of the scope of this documentation. While Centreon Engine is currently configured to send you email notifications, your system may not yet have a mail program properly installed or configured. Refer to your system documentation, search the web for specific instructions on configuring your system to send email messages to external addresses.