new plugin interface for Nagios

[Deomid Ryabkov]

greetings, fellow Nagios users.

well, basically I think it's just about time to add a new plugin interaction interface to Nagios.
pretty bold, ha? ;)
now let me explain. it has been almost a year since we turned to Nagios for our monitoring needs
(we were previosly using BigBrother and oh my dear, was it awful! ;))
so we are being almost happy now. however, as configuration continues to grow, the response time
of the whole monitoring system increases.

currently we have 248 hosts monitored with 755 active checks at a 60 seconds interval.
(interval_length=10, normal_check_interval 6)

being in charge of the monitoring, by now i have done all i could to optimize plugins,
and in fact this has helped a lot to keep the system running at a decent pace.
(for example, i have integrated disk checks into one plugin that uses shared snmplib
instead of calling snmpget, effectively elimitaing another fork)
so the biggest problem at this time seems to be Nagios's need to launch a process for every check.

so now i'm thinking of adding some kind of plugin invocation mechanism into Nagios
that wouldn't require starting up another program.
and what i am thinking of as my options are:

1) shared library mechanism, like Apache modules. should be the fastest of all, but has its shortcomings.
not very flexible.
2) some kind of IPC. this would involve, i think, some check daemon process that'd start with nagios
and respond to check requests from it. a pipe or message queue could be used for communication.
3) just forget about it.

i think i'll do that one way or another. but i want to make it The Right Way (r) and this is
where i turn to you and ask if you have any ideas/opinions/suggestions and in general, if it's worth
implementing at all...

--
 Best regards,
Deomid Ryabkov
UNIX Systems Administrator
RosBusinessConsulting | http://www.rbc.ru/
E-mail: rojer at rbc.ru  | ICQ: 8025844
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