Best Practices

Backing up the entire system

You can easily back up everything unique about your GroundWork installation with the process described in System Back up Restore. Whenever you are about to upgrade to new versions, add connectors, or otherwise adjust the system as a whole, we suggest you do this. It does take monitoring offline for a few minutes, so please ensure you have the redundancy you need in place to ensure continuity. You can also backup and restore just the databases.

Back up the Nagios Monitoring configuration - Always create a backup prior to making changes to the configuration to ensure changes can be recovered if necessary. Each time you implement a change, a backup is automatically created, but in this case the change is already in place in the database. We recommend doing a backup before starting a working session, just to be sure. To make a volitional back up, navigate to Configuration > Nagios Monitoring > Control > Backup and restore. Adding a note to identify the backup can be helpful if you need to restore, additionally locking a backup avoids eventual automatic deletion. See How to back up restore configuration database.

We have not changed the open nature of the GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agent (GDMA). It is still all laid out in a clear file structure that is familiar to those used to working with GroundWork servers and agents. You should use it to make the most of GroundWork, by distributing the monitoring workload out to the monitored servers, including Windows^(tm), Linux, and other platforms.

Many Nagios and Nagios compatible plugins can be run from GroundWork out of the box, but we recognize we don't have every possible plugin loaded. If you do find you need to add some, you can copy them into the nagios container, and even add any missing packages with entrypoint scripts. Let us know what you do add, and we will make them available natively if it makes sense, or at the least add your dependencies to the next release.
If you prefer to add your own dependencies, or your requirements go beyond what is easily containerized, then you can always use GDMA. The file structure is clean and open in the GDMA package, and is easy to add to, customize, and use for specialized monitoring.

You might think it doesn't matter that some of the containers are not running, and be tempted to stop them to save on CPU or RAM. This isn't a good idea - pretty much all the containers are there for good reason, and there's a lot of inter-dependency (though we are certainly working to reduce this and allow you to run leaner). If you are having resource constraints, please let us know by submitting a support request in GroundWork Support, and we'll help you tune the system as needed. In general, however, you may find you need more disk and RAM than you did in GroundWork 7.x to work properly, please see the System Requirements page for details.