FAQs
Observium, Y U NO WORK?
Make sure you are using a supported operating system, a supported webserver (Apache) and have the required versions for the utilities we use (see the Installation page for more information).
If all else fails, join our IRC channel or Mailing Lists and ask for help.
I'm getting a blank browser window on some pages, but not others
Some of the pages are more memory-consuming than others, especially if you have a lot of devices, ports, IP addresses, etc. Make sure your PHP memory setting is adequate for this. If you get blank pages, it usually isn't. Don't forget to restart Apache for the configuration to take effect!
Why do I only get a single CPU view? A lot of information is missing from the device page
Make sure you have granted full access to your SNMP community and not just the "paranoid" level. Net-SNMP has different ways of preventing access to parts of the MIBs, the paranoid setting only gives out a small part of the information we can discover and visualize.
Why can't I add my device by its IP address? / Why do I need valid hostnames and DNS?
Because parts of the auto-discovery code and protocol relationship tracking code requires valid hostnames. We made an early architectural decision to make this name the primary identification for a host.
Observium doesn't care if the name is resolvable via DNS or via /etc/hosts, but it must resolve. It *should* match the hostname the device knows itself as, but no errors will be generated if it doesn't.
Furthermore, for auto-discovery to work properly, the hostname that the device knows itself as *must* be resolvable, again either by DNS or /etc/hosts.
We hope this also helps to mitigate laziness within deployment teams. :)
I have configured my Rancid config path but the configuration is not showing up on the device page
Make sure your hostnames match exactly, and the webserver user can read the configuration file (usually this means adding www-data to the rancid group).
Can I show graphs without requiring a password or login?
There are a few different ways to show graphs. You can allow passwordless graphs from anyone, anywhere, or restrict this on a IP/Subnet basis. See the Configuration Options page for more details.
My net-snmp daemon uses 100% CPU and I have a full BGP table
This is a net-snmp bug. You need to disable ipCidrRouteTable && inetCidrRouteTable.
Add this to your snmpd.conf
view all included .1 80 view all excluded .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.21 view all excluded .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.24 view system included .iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib-2.system
All my hosts seem down to Observium / SNMP doesn't seem to work anymore!
Take a good look, maybe run an snmpget/walk command from the command line. Do you see an error similar to the following?
add_mibdir: strings scanned in from /opt/observium/mibs/.index are too large. count = 214
We are somewhat confused about this, but it seems to be a net-snmp bug. Remove the .index file from the directory and all should be well again!
Why can't I rename a host from the webinterface?
The web interface is most likely running as a different user from the user running your poller/discovery mechanism. This means that user has no permission to rename the directory. Please run the renaming command from the command line instead.
My Cisco router does not show IPv6 BGP sessions - how come?
Please contact your Cisco representative and ask why they chose not to implement IPv6 BGP status into their SNMP stack. (Perhaps you can show them Juniper does do this)
I'm using Redhat/Fedora/CentOS and don't have legends on graphs!
RedHat derrived distributions need additional steps to fix their font setup.
1. yum install dejavu-lgc-fonts.noarch 2. add $config['mono_font'] = "/usr/share/fonts/dejavu/DejaVuLGCSansMono.ttf"; to your config.php