Performance Monitoring in Nagios

dave at homer.cymry.org dave at homer.cymry.org
Wed Dec 24 10:26:42 CET 2003


On Tue, Dec 23, 2003 at 05:04:21PM -0500, Scott Elliott wrote:
> Can anyone point me towards a realistic way of monitoring performance
> data and trend-lining with Nagios?  I know that Nagios can do gather
> some performance monitoring data (as per
> http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/perfdata.html), but from what I
> see, it leaves it up to you what to do with the data.
>...
> Does anyone have any experience in this, and would be willing to share
> their knowledge with me? Unfortunately, just "whipping up an app" to do
> this isn't plausible as my programming/scripting abilities are just
> slightly better than Forest Gump's. 
> 
> 
>  
> Scott Elliott

Most people are going to tell you that they use rrdtool.  rrd is what most admins will
use because it pretty closely follows unix sysadmin philosphy in general. You don't
have to be a programmer, you just have to not be afraid of multi-line commands. You're
already using nagios on linux, so if you've gotten that working, you should have the
tools necessary to get rrdtool working as well.  

There is an addon available which marries rrdtool to nagios called APAN. I've
personally never used it, and most sysadmins probably haven't because rrd is easy
enough to deal with on it's own, and APAN would probably just get in the way, but it
might be usefull to you if you've never used rrd, and don't have preffered way of
working with rrd yet.  

The only caveat really is that although nagios supports performance data, most of the
plugins don't return perfomance data themselves. This is easy enough to remedy by
writing a wrapper around whatever plugins you want to get perf data from.  Yeah I know
that sounds fancy but it isn't.  First read
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/perfdata.html
and realize that all a plugin needs to do is return it's normal output followed by a
pipe character followed by it's normal output again, and presto it now has perf data
support.  A wrapper for check_ping which gives perf data would look like:

#!/bin/sh
$foo=`/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_ping $@`
$return=$?
echo "$foo | $foo"
exit $return

Hope that helps. 


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