How To Install Observium on Ubuntu 15.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration Observium on Ubuntu 15.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Observium is a Network Management and Monitoring System that collects data from using SNMP and allows you to monitor all of the network devices via an easy-to-use interface. It is PHP-based and uses a MySQL database to store data.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Observium on an Ubuntu 15.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Observium on Ubuntu 15.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP)  server.

A Ubuntu 15.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli php5-mysql php5-gd php5-mcrypthp5-json php-pear snmp fping  python-mysqldb rrdtool subversion whois mtr-tiny ipmitool graphviz imagemagick

Step 3. Configuring MariaDB for Observium.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Observium. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Observium installation:

create database observium;
grant all privileges on observium.* to obsuser@localhost identified by 'your_password';
flush privileges;
exit

Step 4. Installing Observium.

First, create a directory for Observium to live in:

mkdir -p /tmp/observium && cd /tmp

Go to Observium’s download page and download the latest stable version of Observium:

wget http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz

Unpack the Observium archive to the document root directory on your server:

tar zxvf observium-community-latest.tar.gz

Copy the default configuration file ‘config.php.default‘ to ‘config.php‘ and fill out the database  config options:

cd observium
cp config.php.default config.php

Changes the database configuration parameters with the ones created previously:

nano config.php

After you edit the file and modify the database parameters, the section should look like this:

// Database config
$config['db_host'] = 'localhost';
$config['db_user'] = 'obsuser';
$config['db_pass'] = 'your_password';
$config['db_name'] = 'observium';

Let’s set up the default schema for the MySQL Database:

php includes/update/update.php

Create the directory to store RRDs in and set the proper ownership:

mkdir rrd
chown www-data:www-data rrd

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Observium.

Now we have to create the virtual host configuration for Observium. You can either add a new virtual host or alter the default one:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /tmp/observium/html
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /tmp/observium/html/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog  ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog  ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

Next, you need to enable rewrite functionality for your Apache server:

a2enmod rewrite

Enable the PHP mcrypt module:

php5enmod mcrypt

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Next, enter the Observium directory:

cd /tmp/observium

Add a first user with a user level of 10 for admin. The command syntax is below:

./adduser.php <username> <password> <level>

We are using the following:

./adduser.php idroot random_password 10

Step 6. Accessing Observium.

Observium will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/ or http://server-ip. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Observium. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Observium Network Management and Monitoring System on your Ubuntu 15.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Observium website.

Save