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Monitoring basics

What does Centreon monitor?​

Centreon allows you to monitor resources. Resources can be hosts or services:

  • A host is any device that has an IP address and that one wishes to monitor. For example, a physical server, a virtual machine, a temperature probe, an IP camera, a printer or a storage space. A host can have one or more associated services.
  • A service is a check point, or indicator, to be monitored on a host. This can be the CPU usage rate, temperature, motion detection, bandwidth usage rate, disk I/O, and so on. A service can consist of one or several metrics.

How does the monitoring work?​

In order to collect each indicator value, monitoring plugins are used which are periodically executed by a collection engine called Centreon Engine.

How do I see the resources being monitored?​

Once hosts and services are monitored, they have a status in Centreon (e.g. OK, Warning, Critical...). You can keep track of any changes using the Monitoring > Resources Status page.

If a problem occurs (not-OK/not-UP status), contacts/users will be able to receive notifications, within set time periods.

What features can I use to help me monitor hosts?​

In Centreon, monitoring is made easy by the following elements:

  • Host templates and service templates, that allow you to define default values so as to speed up the creation of these objects.

  • Plugin Packs, that provide ready-to-use host and service templates. These greatly simplify the configuration of hosts and services: for instance, all you have to do is to apply Plugin Pack templates to a host for it to be monitored.

  • The autodiscovery feature for hosts and services, that allows you to get a list of new hosts and services and to add them automatically to the list of monitored resources.

See also​

To get more familiar with Centreon, you can also read our Glossary of Centreon concepts.