NTP/Time Question

I second this.  NTP is something we need to monitor too as some of our devices go out of sync.

I finally set up NTP in APM.  Goto APM Settings and select "Find Processes, Services, and Performance Counters" on the upper left in "Getting Started with APM".    I selected "Process Monitor - SNMP" since I setup SNMP on my NTP server.  Select your NTP server in "Select Target".  From the list of processes on your NTP server, select the NTP process.  For me, it was "ntpd" daemon.  Then name your Monitor Name and Application Monitor Name and you should be all set for APM to monitor your NTP service.

The suggested solution appears to monitor for the presence of the ntpd process, but I'm interested in the daemon's stratum and difference from the monitoring system's time - numbers provided (among others) by the ntpdc "peers" command.

I visualize the ntpd servers as blocks of wood floating off a dock, and tied to each other by threads.  The dock is stratum 1, blocks tied to the dock are stratum 2, blocks tied to stratum 2 blocks are stratum 3, and so on.  Occasionally a wave will come along (network disruption or pervasive clock interrupt misses) and snap the threads connecting a set a blocks, and they'll go drifting off on their own.  I want to be informed when that happens.  I want to know when NTP daemons change their stratum, and I want to know how far off the monitors time each daemon is.

With nagios, I ran an ntpdc command on the nagios server and lightly massaged its output for consumption.  It doesn't feel right to ssh into a Linux box for each data point; is there something more appropriate?

It sounds like the following templates are what you're looking for.

• Server Clock Drift (PowerShell)
• Server Clock Drift (Perl)