History

OMD - the Open Monitoring Distribution

Welcome to OMD - the Open Monitoring Distribution. OMD implements a completely new concept of how to install, maintain and update a monitoring system built on Nagios.

OMD avoids the tedious work of manually compiling and integrating Nagios addons while at the same time avoiding the problems of pre-packaged installations coming with your Linux distribution, which are most times outdated and provide no regular updates.

OMD bundles Nagios together with many important addons and can easily be installed on every major Linux distribution. We provide prebuilt packages for all enterprise Linux distributions and also for some other, such as Ubuntu 11.04.

Version 0.54 is out!

Finally the new release is available. A list of changes can be found in the Release Notes.

Quick introduction

The following small example illustrates how simple OMD is to use (e.g. on SLES). First install the package matching your operating system:

# zypper install omd-0.50-sles11sp1-25.x86_64.rpm

Now create a monitoring instance (OMD calls this "site"):

# omd create foo

And let's start Nagios and all other processes:

# omd start foo

That's it - everything up and running. As you might have guessed from this
example, OMD has further unique features. It allows you to:

  • Run several monitoring sites in parallel
  • Install and use several different versions of OMD in parallel
  • Easily update, duplicate, rename and manage sites

What OMD contains

OMD currently comes with the following software:

  • nagios
  • Icinga
  • Shinken
  • nagvis
  • pnp4nagios
  • rrdtool/rrdcached
  • Check_MK
  • MK Livestatus
  • Multisite
  • dokuwiki
  • Thruk
  • Mod-Gearman
  • check_logfiles
  • check_oracle_health
  • check_mysql_health
  • jmx4perl
  • check_webinject
  • check_multi

See History for detailed version information.

History

OMD Version History

Features

  • multiple instances per host: OMD supports multiple but separated Nagios instances on the same machine - so called sites, i.e. for one production usage and one test environment.
  • separate omd user per instance: each site has its own operating user. No root permissions are needed for administration.
  • script based tarball building: if you decide to compile omd for yourself, you get a single tarball with all neccessary paths and binaries. Installing this tarball on hosts is as simple as extracting a common tar file.
  • simple creation of new sites: omd create mysite create the site and omd start starts all stuff.
  • supporting different omd version at the same time: you can install different versions in parallel, i.e. running your production instance with the last hard rock version and using the most current version in your test environment. There is an omd upgrade available, but at this time don't rely on it, it is experimental!
  • plattform independent paths: omd installs to /opt/omd on all plattforms. If you don't like this, you can symlink omd to every location you want.
  • speed optimizations: using ncpdmod (NEB module) for processing performance data, rrdcached to speed up rrdtools, tmpfs for check results and livestatus for some webfrontends we try to reduce the disk I/O.

Get OMD running

After that you should read Configuration Basics.

FAQ

If you have any problems working with OMD take a look at the FAQ

Developer documentation

If you are taking part in the OMD project, you might find the developer documentation usefull.

Contact

We set-up several ways to organize the communication round about OMD. Take a look at the contact page.