Agent Overview¶
Cross-Platform Monitoring Agent for openITCOCKPIT written in Go
What is the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent¶
Based on the programming language Go, the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent is a cross-platform application to gather basic information and metrics about the operating system, running services, programs and sensors.
This involves usage information such as CPU, memory, SWAP or disk usage and IO information about disks and network interfaces.
By default, the system polls new values every 30 seconds. Since the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent does not have to provide historical data, but only the current status of the system, outdated information is regularly overwritten with new information and is not saved.
In order to enable your own checks or the execution of existing Nagios plugins, a configuration file can be used to specify which commands (command or path to an executable file) are to be executed at specific time intervals and with defined timeouts. These checks are called custom checks.
Using this method, pre existing Naemon, Nagios, Shinken, Icinga 1 and Sensu plugins can be easily integrated into the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent.
The openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent is available and tested for Windows (32 and 64 bit), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and the common Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, CentOS, SLES and openSUSE (amd64 and arm64).
Please visit the release page to download the latest or older versions.
Communication methods¶
The openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent can operate in Pull or Push Mode. By default the communication is encrypted by TLS and transferred via HTTPS. You don't have to manually create TLS certificates openITCOCKPIT will take care of this.
Pull Mode¶
Pull mode is the recommended and the most common used type of monitoring. In Pull Mode, the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent will start a web server on port 3333.
The openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server will query the Agent every 60 seconds and process all check results.
Communication way: openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server => openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent (HTTPS)
Push Mode¶
In Push Mode, the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent will push the check results every 60 seconds to the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server. The Push Mode is neat whenever the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server is not able to reach the target device like in an NAT or cloud based environment.
By default, the connections gets secured by HTTPS with self-signed certificates. We recommend to use valid certificates like from Let’s Encrypt for this use case, but it is not required.
The Agent's in-build web server is disabled in Push mode. You can enable it via the config.ini if you like.
Communication way: openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent => openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server (HTTPS)
Security concept¶
Unlike most other tools, we decided to enable encryption by default. All Agents are independent from each other so you can choose the perfect communication and encryption method for each Agent.
Auto-TLS (Pull Mode)¶
Auto-TLS is the recommended communication type for Agents running in Pull Mode. The openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server pull an Certificate Signing Request (CSR) from the Agent and sign a unique certificate for the particular Agent. As soon as the certificate handshake was successful the openITCOCKPIT Server will never ever again send an unencrypted connection to the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent.
In addition the certificate will be used for authentication purpose (TLS Client Certificate Authentication). Only the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server can query the check results from the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server.
HTTPS (Pull Mode)¶
If you don't want to use Auto-TLS it is also possible to provide own certificates for HTTPS. In this case you have to enable Basic Authentication to protect the Agent from unauthorized access.
HTTPS (Push Mode)¶
In Push Mode the communication gets encrypted by the HTTPS configuration of the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Server. By default, the Agent will not verify the certificates to enable the usage of self-signed certificates. Certificate validation can be enabled in the config.ini of the Agent.
# Enable this option when your openITCOCKPIT server uses valid TLS certificates
# like from Let's Encrypt
verify-server-certificate = False
HTTP (Pull mode - not recommended)¶
It is also possible to use an unencrypted plaintext HTTP communication, but you explicitly have to enable it by yourself. You can enable Basic Authentication to protect the Agent from unauthorized access.
Basic Authentication¶
HTTP Basic Authentication can be enabled in the config.ini
# Enable HTTP Basic Authentication
# Disabled if blank
# Example: auth = user:password
auth = user:password
Start Monitoring¶
Open the openITCOCKPIT web interface and navigate to openITCOCKPIT Agent -> Agent Wizard and select the host you want to monitor. Follow the wizard to monitor your target system with the openITCOCKPIT Monitoring Agent in 5 steps. The wizard covers everything from choosing the communication method over installing and configuring the Agent up to service creation.
The openITCOCKPIT Beginners guide covers all steps in detail.