Percival -- Network Monitoring System

General

Soluions to the common problems and answers to the common questions will be put here. Questions can be asked on SourceForge forums or percival-users mailing list. To subscribe or view list archives go there. Full Percival documentation can be found here.

Installation&Getting Started

The preferred method of installation is from RPM package. To install from it type:

rpm -ihv percival-1-1.i386.rpm
NOTE: During installation user avalon is created and all Percival processes are run with the permission of user avalon. In order to manage Percival system from CLI you must work as avalon. (su - avalon)

If you are using CLI only it is a good idea to

Q:How to connect to the system ?
A:http://yourhostname:8181

Q:What is initial Percival user and password when installing from RPM ?
A:User is guest password is guest. It is highly recommended that you at least change password. Use

konfne -t password=yourpass cfg /Tree to change it.

Q:Is there a way to access graphs without authentication ?
A:No. However, you can pass authentication information directly in the URL:
http://host:8181/grapher.cgi?target=/Reports;username=guest;password=guest

Percival Processes

Use overlord.pl to manage processes. It is a good idea to disable konfigd process if you are planning to use only command line for system configuration.

Data collection is done by kollector process.

thawne.pl checks for non resonding devices.

querymaker.pl is used to generate reports

Every command in /usr/local/percival/bin should recognize --help option

Example of system startup script is located in /usr/local/percival/bin/lancelotd

Device Configuration

Use konfne to configure device. To add router to the default guest profile do:

konfne -af -i <ip> -c <community> /Tree/dummyname
The command will try to autodetect router type and will use its sysName as router name. If you change some configuration files in /usr/local/percival/etc/lancelot-config run kompile command to update binary database. (konfne updates both databases automagically)

Q:How to add new network device to the Percival?
A:There is an example of Foundry device. It has plenty of comments. Hopefully we will produce a detailed documentation of device API.

Q:How to add new total ?
A: This example will place graph with "sum" of all ethernets from folder /Tree/ServerFarm (actually all interfaces which names match /eth/) in the folder /Tree/Totals/ under the name total_01:
konfne cfg -d Devices::Virtual::Total /Tree/Totals/total_01 -t display-name="Ethernets" -t type=sum -t subtrees=/Tree/ServerFarm -t regexp="eth"