Installing the Open Monitor Distribution (OMD) is actually pretty straight forward on Debian. Consol Labs provides a OMD repository from which the latest version of OMD can be installed, providing both a stable and testing branch.

Installing OMD

First and foremost, you need to have a Debian/Ubuntu system running, and it needs to be connected to the internet.

In order to add the repository, you need to import the GPG security key in order to trust the repository:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys F8C1CA08A57B9ED7
gpg --armor --export F8C1CA08A57B9ED7 | apt-key add -

Next, add the repository to your sources.list. For Debian 8.0 "Jessie", this would be something like this:

echo 'deb http://labs.consol.de/repo/stable/debian jessie main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

Don't forget to replace the distribution code name (in the sample above: jessie) with the version of Debian: e.g. for 7.0, this would become wheezy. For Ubuntu, it basically works the same by using the code names for Ubuntu: e.g. for 10.04, use lucid.

When the update of the repositories is finished, you can install OMD:

apt-get install omd

This will download and install OMD and all of its dependencies. Depending on the speed of the internet and performance of the server, this may take some time.

When the installation is complete, you need to create and start an OMD site:

omd create my-site-name
omd start my-site-name

Once the site has been created and started, it will automatically start again when the server reboots. You can now log on to OMD by pointing your webbrowser to:

http://server-address/my-site-name/omd

The default username and password is:

• User: omdadmin
• Password: omd

Optionally, if you will only have one site, you could set up a redirection page so when surfing to the server IP, you automatically get redirected to the correct URL. To do this, remove/rename the file /var/www/html/index.html and create a new file /var/www/html/index.php with contents:

<?php
      header("Location: /my-site-name/omd/");
?>

Enabling mail notifications

By default, OMD uses the local mail system (whatever it is) to send mail notifications. The most easiest is to set up a local MTA (such as Postfix or Exim) and have it relay the e-mail to an external SMTP host.

Configuring OMD

Completely explaining how to configure OMD would result in a very comprehensive and extended article. In order to get started, I suggest you consult the Check_MK Documentation.