Adding Collectors
In this support article, we have organized the steps and strategies for adding collectors into four primary topics.
- Installation settings
- Downloading and installing Collectors
- Troubleshooting Collectors
- Collector hostname
- Next steps
Installation Settings
Before downloading and installing your Collector, complete the settings found in the first two areas of the Add a Collector dialog box, highlighted next.
Choose Where to Install a Collector
Prior to configuring your new Collector, you will need to decide to which device it will be added.
For each location of your infrastructure, we recommend that you install a Collector on a server that is physically close to the devices it will monitor. For the sake of reliability, you do not want a Collector to have to communicate across the internet to poll devices in another datacenter, or though firewalls, or network address translation (NAT) gateways. You should additionally ensure that the server you choose for Collector installation meets the following requirements:
- Windows or Linux (physical or virtual) server
Note: If you want to collect data from Windows systems, the Collector must be installed on a Windows server.
Note: LogicMonitor follows the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy (specifically the "Extended Support End Date") and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle (specifically the "End of Maintenance Support 2 (Product retirement)" date) when determining which Windows and Linux server operating systems are supported for Collector installation.
- Able to make an outgoing https connection (TLS on port 443) to the LogicMonitor servers (proxies are supported)
- A minimum of 1GB of RAM (preferably 2GB if you plan to collect data from more than 100 devices). Visit our Collector Capacity page for more information.
- Able to communicate with all of the devices it will monitor via the appropriate protocols, for example, SNMP, WMI, HTTP, JDBC. This means that you should have the ports for these monitoring protocols (161 UDP for SNMP, 3306 TCP for MySQL, etc.) are unrestricted between your collector machine and the devices you want to monitor.
- The Collector should have reliable time - thus it should have NTP setup or Windows Time Services to synchronize via NTP. If running on a VMware virtual machine, install VMware tools with VMware tools periodic Time Sync disabled.
It is common for companies to place the Collector on machines such as syslog servers, DNS servers, or other relatively unconstrained servers.
Note: For instructions on how to configure your Collector for use with HTTP proxies, see this article.
Ports
The following ports are important for communication between the Collector and devices:
Monitor the Device on Which the Collector is Installed
Check this option if you'd like to enter the device on which the Collector is installed into monitoring. Once checked, the Device Group field displays, allowing you to assign the Collector's host (i.e. the device onto which you are installing the Collector) into a Device Group. Even if you leave the Device "Ungrouped," LogicMonitor will automatically add the Collector's host to the dynamic group titled "Collectors."
Select a Collector
In the Select a Collector area of the Add a Collector dialog box (shown next), select the download file you will install, its version, and size (which correlates to monitoring capacity). You also have the option of assigning the new Collector to a Collector Group.
Select Collector Download File
Select the appropriate Collector download file for your server:
- 32 bit or 64 bit Windows
- 32 bit or 64 bit Linux
Select Collector Version
Select among the available General Release and Early Release Collectors:
- General Release Collectors. General Release Collectors are our most stable Collector versions available. We recommend this Collector version for the majority of your infrastructure.
- Early Release Collectors. Early Release Collectors offer new features and functionality, but we cannot guarantee that they are perfectly stable and bug-free. For this reason, we recommend that you use an Early Release Collector version only when it has features from which you would benefit. If you have a large deployment, we don't recommend this Collector version for your entire infrastructure.
Note: You can always change your Collector version by uninstalling and re-installing a Collector.
Select Collector Size
If you are downloading Collector version 23.000 or higher, you will be given the option to select the Collector's size. There are four Collector sizes available:
- Nano. This Collector does not have a memory requirement as it will consume less than 1GB of system memory and will monitor a limited number of Devices.
- Small. This Collector will consume 1GB of system memory and is capable of monitoring roughly 200 (Linux Collector) or 100 (Windows Collector) Devices.
- Medium. This Collector will consume 2GB of system memory and is capable of monitoring roughly 1000 (Linux Collector) or 500 (Windows Collector) Devices.
- Large. This Collector will consume 4GB of system memory and is capable of monitoring roughly 2000 (Linux Collector) or 750 (Windows Collector) Devices.
Note: The number of devices a Collector can monitor varies depending upon the data collection method it employs (e.g. SNMP, JDBC, WMI, etc). Please visit this page for a breakdown of Collector capacity by data collection method as well as the config settings for each Collector size.
Assign the Collector to a Collector Group
From the Collector Group field, you may assign your new Collector to an existing Collector Group or use the + icon to the right of the field to create a new group on the fly. Collector Groups pool your Collectors based on factors such as their physical locations, their environments (e.g. QA, development, or production), or- if you are an MSP- customer. This streamlines the process of configuring permission settings and managing your Collectors. For more information on Collector Groups, see Collector Groups.
Downloading and Installing Collectors
This section overviews the steps and strategies for:
- Installing a Windows Collector
- Installing a Linux Collector
- Installing using the bootstrap
Installing a Windows Collector
To install a Windows Collector:
- You can either install your Collector using the new account setup wizard or from the Settings tab of your account if you've already exited or completed the wizard.
- If you're starting from the new account wizard, then you've just created your first user and are being prompted to select installation settings (e.g. Collector type, version, etc.) for your first Collector.
- If you're starting from the Settings tab, click Add in the Collectors section, establish the installation settings and click Next.
- Once you've downloaded the installer, open it. This will start the Install Shield Wizard on Windows. The Install Shield Wizard will extract the binary and prompt you for credentials.
These credentials will correspond to the account that the Collector will run under. If other Windows systems will not be monitored by this Collector, you can run the services as Local System. Otherwise, consider specifying a domain account that is a local administrator for all the Windows computers to be monitored with a password set not to expire. Running the Collector in this context removes any authentication issues, as the account will be able to access and query all computers. If the computer hosting the Collector is not part of a domain, it is recommended to run the Collector service as a local administrator account.
The supported Windows credentials are:
- Collector and devices in domain, Collector running as domain account with local administrator privileges.
- Collector and devices not in domain, Collector running as local administrator account, and connecting to each host with local administrator credentials. For more information, see Credentials for accessing remote Windows computers.
Note: As discussed in the Troubleshooting Windows Collectors area of this support article, the LogicMonitor Collector service must have the "Log on as a service" user right assigned to it from the Collector machine's Default Domain Policy.
- After you've successfully installed the Collector on your Windows server, return to your browser and verify that the Collector can communicate with LogicMonitor's datacenters.
Installing a Linux Collector
You can either install your first Collector using the new account setup wizard, or from the Settings tab of your account if you've already exited or completed the wizard. If you're starting from the new account wizard: you've just created your first user and are being prompted to select a Collector type and version for your first Collector. If you're starting from the Settings tab: click Add in the Collectors section, review the requirements for selecting a machine and click next, and then you should be at this step:
If your server supports web browsing, you can download the installer directly to your server. Otherwise, you can either use cURL or Wget to download the installer to your server, or you can download the installer on another computer and use scp to copy it over to your server. If you intend to use cURL or Wget, use the 'get cURL cmd' or 'get Wget cmd' buttons to copy the download command directly to your clipboard.
Under Linux environments, the Collector is required to run as root. The primary reason for this requirement is because the Collector services need direct access to the networking stack for the ping Collector to function properly.
Note: /bin/ping is SUID root.
You can SSH into your Linux server, and paste the copied command to download the installer to your server:
Next change the permissions and make the binary executable, and then run the executable:
After you've successfully installed the Collector on your Linux server, return to your browser and verify that the Collector can communicate with LogicMonitor's datacenters.
Installing Using the Bootstrap
You will notice "bootstrap" and "full package" options under the "Download a Collector" stage. The bootstrap is a smaller installation package (~500kB) that enables you to download and install Collectors much faster via the LogicMonitor CDN, whereas the "full package" option is approximately 200MB.
Troubleshooting Collectors
Next we've compiled some helpful troubleshooting tips for Windows and Linux Collectors.
Troubleshooting Windows Collectors
Error 1069
A common error encountered for Windows Collectors is error 1069:
Error 1069: The service did not start due to a logon failure.Although this error can be temporarily addressed by reentering the password for the service account, it will fail some hours later. In order to permanently address this error, the account must be assigned user rights to "log on as a service" from the computer's Domain Policy.
To assign the "log on as a service" user right to the Collector service account and update the policy…
- Go to Administrator Tools | Group Policy Management.
- Right-click on Default Domain Policy and click Edit from the context menu that appears.
- From the Default Domain Policy folder tree, navigate to Windows Settings | Policies | Security Settings | Local Policies | User Rights Assignment | Log on as a service.
- From the Log on as a service Properties page, check the Define these policy settings option and click the Add User or Group button to add the Collector service account to the policy.
- Once the Collector service account is added and applied from the Default Domain Policy settings, force the group policy update by executing "gpupdate /force" from the Collector machine's command prompt.
- Assuming the policy is updated to the Collector's machine, you should be able to successfully restart the Collector service. Go to Task Manager | Services, right-click on logicmonitor-agentand click Restart
Troubleshooting Other Common Windows Monitoring Scenarios
The most commonly used monitoring scenarios on Windows are based on WMI and Perfmon. Below are the typically referenced help pages to get going with monitoring Windows devices:
The most commonly used monitoring scenarios on Windows are based on WMI and Perfmon. Below are the typically referenced help pages to get going with monitoring Windows devices:
Troubleshooting Linux Collectors
NSCD
The LogicMonitor Collector makes a lot of DNS queries (to resolve the hosts it is monitoring, and to determine which LogicMonitor servers to report data to.) While running nscd is a good idea, you should make sure that the nscd you run respects positive DNS TTLs. For example, on Redhat ES/CentOS, glibc-2.5-24 and earlier does not respect DNS TTLs correctly, so ensure you are running a later version, or disable nscd. This is important both for updates to your own hostnames that are monitored, but also in the event of a failover from one LogicMonitor datacenter to another - if nscd returns a stale record for an hour, this would impact your monitoring.
Please note that with GD.2300 onward, we will be phasing out Collector installation support for RHEL and Centos version 5 releases (this includes 5.11 release).
SE Linux
For certain Linux distributions (Redhat, CentOS, Fedora) Security-Enhanced Linux may be enabled, which poses additional permissions hurdles for the Collector to achieve reliable monitoring. You may use the following command to query SE Linux for its current mode (enabled + enforcing or passive/disabled/permissive):
sestatusIf you are having monitoring problems on your Linux box and SE Linux "current mode" is set to "active", "enabled", or "enforcing" status, please use the following command to see if it alleviates your monitoring problems:
setenforce PermissiveIn permissive mode, more denials are logged because actions that would otherwise be denied in enforcing mode are allowed. As such, you may be able to run the Collector services in permissive mode and use the SELinux logs to identify the permissions that need to be enabled. Once you've done so, you should enable the necessary permissions and then use "setenforce 1" to put SE Linux back into enforcing mode.
Collector Hostname
How is the Collector's hostname set?
The Collector's name is established as soon as a Collector is downloaded and registered with a LogicMonitor server. The hostname is discovered by resolving the hostname of the Collector host.
For Linux, the Collector will run either a "hostname -f" or "hostname" command to identify the hostname. If both commands fail, "localhost.localdomain" will be used.
For Windows, the hostname is a combination of the domain and COMPUTERNAME.
Is there anyway to change the Collector hostname?
The Collector hostname can not be changed via the LogicMonitor UI. If you wish to change it, you can rename the Collector's host and restart your Collector. This document details the process of resetting hostnames for Linux devices.
