Connecting nagios to asset management/inventory systems

[tobias.hunger at iteratio.com]

Hi there!

I am rather new to nagios and hope to have picked the right list to send
this
mail to. Sorry if I picked the wrong one... I did read the manual and
hope
I did not miss some important information.
                                          
I have a asset management system and a trouble ticket system set up and
running here. Connecting nagios to the TT system is easy: A simplle
script
getting called by nagios on notifications is enough.
                                          
Now how can I connect nagios to the asset management system? All
information
about my hosts/network is already stored there, I don't want to reenter it

for nagios... Are there hooks provided by nagios to attach it to other
datasources but the configuration files? Are there good reasons not to 
provide such hooks? I think nagios would benefit a lot from users being
able 
to use other configuration methods... 

One idea I had was to have an external program read all the configuration,

passing on the data to nagios via var/rw/nagios.cmd. You could configure
that command in nagios.cfg. The downside is that var/rw/nagios.cmd would  
     become mandatory. The positive effects would be that a user could
setup
hosts via a CGI script or plug in other configuration backends and lots
of
nasty parsing code could get removed from the core nagios program. The  
configuration code is not used that often, so moving it into an external 
programm should not have a performance impact. 
 
Well, maybe there is a better way to do this... You are the pros, I am
sure 
you have better ideas how to manage this issue.
 
Regards,
Tobias
 
PS: Of course I'm volunteering to do the necessary work.


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