observium-freebsd-install

Manual installation of Observium on FreeBSD. Observium is an advanced auto discovering network management system centred around SNMP.

This document is aiming to provide a complete production ready setup.

Updating the FreeBSD port was a thing I discussed with various people but the main obstacle is the fact that Observium has got particular installation paths hardcoded so making it adhere to FreeBSD filesystem hierarchy standards would involve creating and maintaining a ton of patches.

Also customers with a commercial ("professional" or "enterprise" edition) license install and update Observium by checking out directly from the developers' SVN repository.

So a port does not really make sense. I created these - hopefully complete and correct - instructions instead.

General considerations

a dedicated machine or jail for Observium
Apache 2.4 and mod_php for PHP execution
cron jobs run as root
all required third party software installed as packages
keep the default install location of /opt/observium

Additionally this guide assumes you are working from a root shell. No sudo for each command as seems to be preferred in Debian or Ubuntu based howtos, because sudo is not part of the FreeBSD base system. Use SSH login to root (following Ubuntu and setting PermitRootLogin prohibit-password for that) or use su - or sudo -s as preferred.

Installation

Make sure DNS and NTP are configured correctly and working.

Install required packages

Configure `pkg` to use "latest" instead of "quarterly" repository

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
echo 'FreeBSD: { url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest" }' >/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
pkg upgrade -y
pkg autoremove -y

Install packages

pkg install ImageMagick7-nox11 fping git-tiny graphviz ipmitool mariadb1011-server mtr-nox11 nagios-plugins net-snmp nmap php83 mod_php83 php83-bcmath php83-ctype php83-curl php83-filter php83-gd php83-mbstring php83-mysqli php83-posix php83-session php83-pear-Services_JSON php83-pecl-APCu php83-pecl-mcrypt python python3 py311-pymysql rancid3 rrdtool

Enable and start MariaDB and create the database

Enable the database server

sysrc mysql_enable=YES
service mysql-server start

Create database and database user

mysql
root@localhost [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE observium DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
root@localhost [(none)]> CREATE USER 'observium'@'localhost' identified by '<db password>';
root@localhost [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON observium.* TO 'observium'@'localhost';
Ctrl-D

Enable and start rrdcached

sysrc rrdcached_enable=YES
service rrdcached start

Download and extract Observium

If you want a specific release instead of the latest use a URL like this: http://www.observium.org/observium-community-23.9.tar.gz

mkdir -p /opt/observium
cd /opt
fetch http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz
tar xvfz observium-community-latest.tar.gz
rm observium-community-latest.tar.gz
chown -R root:wheel observium
mkdir observium/logs observium/rrd
chown www:www observium/rrd

Configure and initialise Observium database

Configure Observium

Create /opt/observium/config.php with this content:

<?php

$config['db_host']                   = 'localhost';
$config['db_socket']                 = '/var/run/mysql/mysql.sock';
$config['db_name']                   = 'observium';
$config['db_user']                   = 'observium';
$config['db_pass']                   = '<db password>';

// End config.php
?>

Initialise the database

cd /opt/observium
./discovery.php -u

Configure Observium 3rd party tools paths

FreeBSD installs optional packages into the /usr/local hierarchy. So we need to adjust the default paths of more or less every single external tool.

Add this to /opt/observium/config.php:

$config['rrdtool']                   = "/usr/local/bin/rrdtool";
$config['fping']                     = "/usr/local/sbin/fping";
$config['fping6']                    = "/usr/local/sbin/fping6";
$config['snmpwalk']                  = "/usr/local/bin/snmpwalk";
$config['snmpget']                   = "/usr/local/bin/snmpget";
$config['snmpgetnext']               = "/usr/local/bin/snmpgetnext";
$config['snmpbulkget']               = "/usr/local/bin/snmpbulkget";
$config['snmpbulkwalk']              = "/usr/local/bin/snmpbulkwalk";
$config['snmptranslate']             = "/usr/local/bin/snmptranslate";
$config['mtr']                       = "/usr/local/sbin/mtr";
$config['nmap']                      = "/usr/local/bin/nmap";
$config['ipmitool']                  = "/usr/local/bin/ipmitool";
$config['git']                       = "/usr/local/bin/git";
$config['dot']                       = "/usr/local/bin/dot";
$config['unflatten']                 = "/usr/local/bin/unflatten";
$config['neato']                     = "/usr/local/bin/neato";
$config['sfdp']                      = "/usr/local/bin/sfdp";

$config['nagplug_dir']               = "/usr/local/libexec/nagios";
$config['rrdcached']                 = "unix:/var/run/rrdcached.sock";

Add Observium cron jobs

Edit root's crontab

crontab -e

Add cron jobs

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

# Run automated discovery of newly added devices every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * /opt/observium/observium-wrapper discovery --host new >/dev/null 2>&1

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

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

Configure, enable and start Apache web server

Enable mod_rewrite

sed -i '' -e 's/^#LoadModule rewrite_module/LoadModule rewrite_module/' /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf

Configure vhost

Create /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/observium.conf with this content:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName <your FQDN>
    DocumentRoot /opt/observium/html
    <FilesMatch \.php$>
      SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
    </FilesMatch>
    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /opt/observium/html/>
            DirectoryIndex index.php
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

You need some FQDN to access the application, possibly internal. Enabling SSL either via reverse proxy or in Apache is not covered in this guide.

Add `/usr/local` paths to Apache runtime environment

On FreeBSD by default server processes like Apache start with a limited search path. This prohibits Observium from detecting Python correctly. So we add the necessary paths now.

echo 'PATH="/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin"' >/usr/local/etc/apache24/envvars.d/path.env

Add FQDN to Observium configuration

Add this to /opt/observium/config.php:

$config['base_url']                  = 'http://<your FQDN>';

Enable and start Apache

sysrc apache24_enable=YES
service apache24 start

Add first administrator user

cd /opt/observium
./adduser.php admin <password> 10

Login from your Browser

Go to http://<your FQDN> as configured in the steps above, login with the admin user just created.

You can now add devices.

Rancid integration (optional)

Rancid is a tool to automatically poll routers, switches and similar devices for configuration changes and put these changes into some version control system like SVN or git.

Configuring Rancid is beyond the scope of this document but since the database paths are FreeBSD specific they are added here for completeness.

Assuming you have a single group in Rancid named observium:

LIST_OF_GROUPS="observium"; export LIST_OF_GROUPS

then add this to /opt/observium/config.php:

$config['rancid_configs'][]          = "/usr/local/var/rancid/observium/configs/";
$config['rancid_version']            = "3";
$config['rancid_ignorecomments']     = 0;

FreeBSD as a monitored system

FreeBSD comes with its own SNMP server bsnmpd but the more common net-snmp package is better supported and offers some extension features we will use.

Install the Observium distro script

fetch -o /usr/local/sbin/distro https://raw.githubusercontent.com/observium/distroscript/master/distro
chmod 755 /usr/local/sbin/distro

Install and configure net-snmp

Install package

pkg install net-snmp

Configure snmpd

Create the file /usr/local/etc/snmpd.conf with this content:

agentAddress    udp:161

view            all     included    .1
rocommunity     public  default     -V all

includeAllDisks 10%

sysLocation     <your system location>
sysContact      <your system contact>

# http://oid-info.com/get/1.3.6.1.2.1.1.7
sysServices     72

#  https://docs.observium.org/device_linux
extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.1 distro     /usr/local/sbin/distro
extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.2 hardware   /bin/kenv smbios.planar.product
extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.3 vendor     /bin/kenv smbios.planar.maker
extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.4 serial     /bin/kenv smbios.planar.serial

Depending on the system you might want to replace planar with system in the lines above. Just try the commands interactively to find out which gives the most useful information.

Enable and start net-snmpd

sysrc snmpd_enable=YES
echo 'snmpd_conffile="/usr/local/etc/snmpd.conf"' >/etc/rc.conf.d/snmpd
service snmpd start

Monitoring FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi

SNMP configuration

For a Raspberry Pi running FreeBSD follow the FreeBSD section above but in /usr/local/etc/snmpd.conf replace the four extend lines with these three instead:

(There is no useful "vendor" information to be gathered from the device itself.)

extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.1 distro     /usr/local/sbin/distro
extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.2 hardware   /sbin/sysctl -n hw.fdt.model
extend          .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.7890.4 serial     /sbin/sysctl -n hw.fdt.serial-number

Linux / Raspberry Pi agent

Observium comes with a Linux agent script that augments the data gathered by SNMP. It's too Linux-centric to be used unmodified but we can replace it with a short shell script of our own and feed core frequency and core temperature into Observium.

Deploy the agent script

Deploy this script as /usr/local/sbin/observium-rpi-agent:

#!/bin/sh

# close standard input (for security reasons) and stderr
if [ "$1" = -d ]
then
    set -xv
else
    exec <&- 2>/dev/null
fi

echo '<<<Observium>>>'
echo 'Version: 1.0.0'
echo "AgentOS: $(/usr/bin/uname -o)"

echo '<<<raspberrypi>>>'
echo "clock-core: $(/sbin/sysctl -n dev.cpu.0.freq)"
echo "temp: $(/sbin/sysctl -n dev.cpu.0.temperature)"

exit 0

Make it executable: chmod 755 /usr/local/sbin/observium-rpi-agent.

Configure inetd

echo "observium-agent 36602/tcp #Observium Unix Agent" >>/etc/services
echo "observium-agent stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/sbin/observium-rpi-agent observium-rpi-agent" >>/etc/inetd.conf

Enable and start inetd

sysrc inetd_enable=YES
service inetd start

Restrict access to the agent (optional)

Place this in /etc/hosts.allow - at the top right before the ALL : ALL : allow line:

observium-rpi-agent : <IP address of your Observium host> : allow
observium-rpi-agent : ALL : deny

EOF

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 17 Commits
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
config.php		config.php
observium-rpi-agent		observium-rpi-agent
observium.conf		observium.conf
snmpd.conf		snmpd.conf

License

pmhausen/observium-freebsd-install

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