Generating nagios configs from LDAP, nmap, and traceroute

[Ben Lisle]

Hi,

We're doing exactly this sort of thing at the moment.

It's a real pain in the ass having to manage a whole range of
applications to monitor/manage network elements.  We use Nagios, Cricket
(RRDTool), Pancho, Networklens, Smokeping, and one or two others.  Each
of them have their own way of storing their configuration information.
Each of them have some nifty application that can be used to manage
them.  Urgh!

We're using LDAP as a machine database of sorts.  The theory goes
something like this.  We'll have our own application (both web-based and
a PyGTK tool) which will be used to modify/view/add records in LDAP. 
Once you're happy with a configuration you can "push" the new device to
the various applications you'll be using.  So it'll put a good
Defaults/Targets definition in the right spot in the Cricket config
tree, it'll build the host/hostgroups/service configs for Nagios, that
sort of thing.  It'll obviously config the other tools we use, but those
are the main two we're working on right now.

I've got a rough schema hacked out for Cricket at the moment, so we're
just beyond the planning stage finally.  The Nagios schema will probably
be next.
 
If there's any interest for this sort of thing let me know.  I'll see if
I can con our management into releasing these sorts of things. If not
I'll put up some documenation on what we've done and why we did it.

I hate release dates, but we should have a fairly working tool by
mid-late February.

Rocking!

Ben

On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 08:37, Luke A. Kanies wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've just started on a project to generate my nagios configurations, and
> I'd like to know if others have worked on similar projects, and I'd also
> like to know if others would find this work useful, and if so, how.
> 
> One of my barriers to using nagios has always been my unwillingness to
> maintain yet another host list.  I already maintain a list of all of my
> hosts in LDAP, and my nagios configs need to automatically update
> themselves based on that list.  Also, I can't have my nagios configuration
> be the definition of what "should" be running on the system, because then
> when I update the host I have to update Nagios, which I hate.
> 
> So, I'm trying to come up with a design for maintaining my entire Nagios
> data configuration automatically.  My LDAP host list is basically
> self-maintaining (I have a client/server style script that does most the
> work), I already have all of my contacts in LDAP, the network is
> authoritative on what machines each of my machines depends on, and the
> hosts themselves are (usually) authoritative on what services they should
> be providing.
> 
> What I want is something to collect all of that and turn it into a valid
> nagios config.  However, there are still some pieces missing.  For
> instance, the LDAP directory is not currently capable of holding the
> templates for the various object types, and there are some nagios-specific
> details I'll probably want to associate with hosts and contacts.
> 
> So, I think the first step is to create a nagios schema for LDAP.  This is
> the main thing I want to check:  Would I be redoing someone else's work
> here?  It's definitely a no-no to have schema variety.  If no one else has
> ever done this before, then I'll go ahead and create one for OpenLDAP (it
> should be easily usable for most other LDAP servers) and contribute it
> back to the Nagios developers.
> 
> Second is getting the data out of the directory.  I've actually already
> created a set of ruby classes which do this quite well.  I've also created
> a parser in ruby which can parse existing files and glean all the data in
> them; it's a small stretch from where I am to parsing those files and
> putting all of their data into LDAP.  Because I don't currently have any
> nagios configs, I'm less interested in moving data into LDAP, but I'd be
> glad to work with people who would like to transition from storing data in
> flat files to storing it in LDAP.
> 
> Next is figuring out which services a given host should be running.  I am
> currently focusing on external services (i.e., ports), but will later
> visit using nrpe et al to monitor other stuff.  I know that there is
> already an nmap2nagios script, and I would probably plan on utilyzing
> lessons from this script, but because I need the results to interoperate
> with the rest of my data structures I'll probably write something similar
> in ruby.  This tool will specifically support only scanning specific for
> specific ports, as in most cases I don't want to monitor every port.
> 
> Lastly is deducing the dependencies for each host.  Apparently not many
> people (none?) have built automated topology tools using traceroute, as I
> could not find any online (well, I could find some that resulted in maps,
> but none that were generically for building topologies).  It should be
> pretty simple to do, so I plan on adding a 'dependencies' method or
> something to my ruby objects that transparently uses traceroute to figure
> out the dependencies.  I may later abstract that into an overall topology
> tool, but unless I have a client specifically request that, I am unlikely
> to do so any time soon.  (I'm an independent consultant and am doing all
> this for a client.)  It also would not be a bad idea to have an option for
> automatically monitoring these extra hosts.
> 
> So, now that you basically know my plans, my main question is:  Has
> someone done something like this before?  I'm slightly incredulous that
> everyone using nagios is hand-editing every config file and manually
> adding every service and every dependency.
> 
> I'm hoping to release all of the code I write, but it will take some
> effort on my part, as my current client has one of those we-get-everything
> contracts.  At the very least I plan on writing an article on my
> experiences and then probably redoing the work in my free time.
> 
> Anyone have any of this experience?
> 
> Thanks,
> Luke Kanies
> Reductive Consulting
> 
> 
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