Keep an eye on your network - Observium Tutorial

A wise man once said "You can't know what's wrong if you never knew what right looks like". That was me. Keeping a watchful eye on your servers and network gear is quite a challenge, but where do you even begin? Today, I'm going to show you how to setup Observium to monitor and log activity for any device on your network. Best of all, its 100% free.

But first... What am I drinking???

From Big Ditch Brewing (NY) comes... a beer that tastes like beer in the form of A Beer That Tastes Like Beer. It's definitely a beer, and it tastes like a beer, but I'm not sure if it's the beer-like beer they were going for.

*Links to items below may be affiliate links for which I may be compensated*

Hardware from my server rack

- Network -

- HP DL80 Gen9 -

- Supermicro Ultra Servers -

- Hyve Zeus 1U Servers -

- Chenbro NR12000 -

- Storage Server -

- Cloud Gaming Server -

- UPS Unit -

- Air Conditioning -

Follow me on Twitter @CraftComputing

Support me on Patreon or Floatplane and get access to my exclusive Discord server. Chat with myself and the other hosts on Talking Heads all week long.

0:00 Intro
2:50 Observium Install
4:31 Linux SNMP v2c
7:44 Windows SNMP v2c
9:31 Linux SNMP v3
11:35 Windows ~~SNMP v3~~ WMI
15:51 Wrap up
18:02 Beer That Tastes Like Beer
Music:
Intractable by Kevin MacLeod

[jbevren]

I use Observium already, and wanted to note that my network printer and Observium even work together to accurately report levels and lifespan of internal components like the toner level and drum/fuser life remaining.

[TheRogueBro]

No notification (because i have those turned off) but literally like "oh hey, i forgot something and i know Jeff made a video"... Now i have no idea what i was looking for because here i am watching this one. Thanks Jeff... :-P

[praecorloth]

"SNMP: Four lies in one acronym" -Michael Lucas

[raymondt]

Thank you for going into so much detail regarding SNMP and WMI lifecycle and setup. Really appreciated.

[TobiasMann]

I'd love to see what you look for when diagnosing common network anomalies.

[wizdude]

Thanks for this tutorial - especially for all the DCOM configuration notes. All in one digestible section. Nice. Cheers 😊

[srsys]

Ty for the run down on Observium. I would love a vid diving into using this to monitor networking equipment and printers.

[ozmosyd]

A rather excellent intro into snmp. Thanks for sharing chap!

[handlealreadytaken]

Would be great to spend a little time showing what the Observium software looks like and how easy it is to work with. I skimmed the video twice and nearly all the content was how to setup the clients to report data.

[squirrel_ca]

Great content as always. Would love to see a more in-depth video on this. Thanks again for the great content.

[mncllama]

I have to elaborate slightly as I felt very similar when I had that beer before sending it to you. I agree the description on the can wasn't quite there and your review was spot on. Now for the price reveal, for a $8 for the 4 pack of 16oz cans it makes a decent lawn mower beer, they have a whole series of "beer that tastes like beer" and I need to try the rest to see which ones they really nail off any.

[gbrown]

Loved the run down of Observium… you had the beer sitting there and I didn’t even realize it was Big Ditch. Buffalo guy here so like my eyes perked up when you said it. Never tried that one but Big Ditch is known in Buffalo for Hayburner for IPA’s. Past the season now but for fall there Cinnamon Apple Amber Ale is outstanding.

[RARvolt]

I would recommend SHA-256 instead of MD5. Or is there preventing it?

[Richard]

Fun fact I used to work at an ISP after the creator of observium and worked there. So we had a very very early version installed.

[PMEP]

I think it would be useful to see a walk through of the Observium and features of it

[dafydds]

Thanks for this, I did watch your video some time ago, but only got around to trying this software recently. Thank-you! I've used a number of enterprise packages professionally, but this product just makes things so much easier for my home network. Don't get me wrong, I've tried a few home-lab packages, but they all just turned into an Admin mess, so this ticks all the boxes for me.

[Yamitz]

I’d love to see more about how to troubleshoot network issues. Like when a switch seems to be randomly eating packets. When I started having this issue recently I had literally no idea where to start other than moving Ethernet cables around to identify it was definitely the switch.

[christhompson]

Apparently the Craft Computing secret lair is on the island of San Miguel off the coast of Portugal.

[Blooest]

I have to be the super pedantic one: "depreciated" and "deprecated" are two very different words.

[nicholasmccall]

Great video - I do this for a living. Used a handful of different enterprise monitoring solutions over the past few years. This free solution looks pretty robust though.