Question

Balancing loads with Nagwin (Nagios)

Answer 1

It is increasingly common for companies to have multiple Internet outlets. Either by redundancy, load balancing or different reasons.

By distributing different services both input and output between these lines of communication and the proliferation of servers and services it becomes essential to work proactively monitoring all lines of communication.

Now we will explain how we can do this in a simple and efficient way with the NAGWIN monitoring system . The Nagwin open source monitoring system has a module for monitoring up to five routers simultaneously. The operation handles it in a very simple way.

• Suppose we have three Internet outlets. One of TELEFONICA ARGENTINA , one of FIBERTEL CORPORATE and one last line of ADSL of ARNET PERSONAL (we agree that the companies can be the providers of each country, in this case we will take the ones that we have in Argentina today). The IP addresses of these routers could be 10.16.0.254, 10.16.0.253 and 10.16.0.252 respectively.

• The monitoring of the routers will indicate both the internal response and the availability of Internet access through each router.

• The base system has static routes to external Hosts, such as Google's DNS services with IP 10.0.0.1. We assign a gateway to each external static route as shown below:

External Host TELEFONICA ARGENTINA: 10.1.1.1. Gateway: 10.16.0.254

External Host FIBERTEL CORPORATE: 10.0.0.1 Gateway: 10.16.0.253

External Host ARNET PERSONAL: 10.2.2.2. Gateway: 10.16.0.252

• If the internal IP of the router responds and it is possible to access the Internet through it, Nagwin shows it in the following way: "Correct monitoring of the external Router and Host"

• If the internal IP of the router does not respond, Nagwin exposes the status as follows: "Router failed monitoring"

• If the internal IP of the router responds but it is not possible to access the Internet through it, the Nagwin monitoring system shows it to us in the following way: "Monitoring in external Host failure alert"

In case of a failure in the monitoring we can schedule an alert by email or SMS, in addition to the alert on the screen. In this simple way every time we have a fault in some line of communication, quickly and with a simple glance we can know which of the lines is the one that has the problem and if what does not answer is the router itself or if it is of a problem in the provider.

I also wanted to remind you that with Nagwin it is possible to monitor up to 5 lines simultaneously and that there is also another control that works in a similar way, in this case we can monitor the VPN lines.
With this simple application we will have our load balancing more than oiled.

Ricardo Quagliano

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