Comprehensive LDAP Monitoring with "Bell Tower"
2019-11-06, 14:30–15:15, Main Conference Room

Click HERE to view the presentation slide deck.

In this lightning talk we will be describing the different features of Bell Tower. This talk will include discussions on other strategies to monitor LDAP and how adding Bell Tower to your LDAP monitoring can strengthen your LDAP environment. We will next discuss all the features of Bell Tower and conclude with a live demo.


Bell Tower was created for the sole purpose of monitoring LDAP environments. Rather than setting up monitoring software with partial LDAP monitoring, Bell Tower provides real time LDAP performance metrics for your LDAP environment all visible within modern looking graphs. This differs from using other monitoring solutions such as the ltb project scripts which need to be paired with other monitoring software such as Nagios XI or Cacti to work effectively and any results are obtained in intervals. Using normal monitoring also do not result in queryable data while Bell Tower does.

Bell Tower provides real time LDAP performance metrics using the following process:
1. The Bell Tower agent ingests and forwards data to the Bell Tower collector
2. The Bell Tower collector parses all the logs by storing connection sessions in memory, where all the connection's metadata is gathered
3. That data is stored and indexed on each attribute for easy metric querying
4. Data can then be queried by Bell Tower to provide graphs and other features

The above process allows bell tower to gather metrics in real time. Also all the metrics are indexed and are queryable.

Bell Tower has the following features:
1. Real time performance data
2. Time, host, operation, and DN based querying
3. Modern UI with sleek graphs
4. Log collection: See incoming logs from all hosts in real time, all from your browser
5. Alerting: Set thresholds and receive sms and email notifications for your data
6. Replication Monitoring. See the replication status of all your service in a single visualization
7. User authentication to access the Bell Tower dashboard
8. Support for other directory servers*

Notes:

  • Currently only works with Symas openldap (silver and gold). Support for OpenLDAP and Active Directory is planned.