check_nagios isn't very smart.

[Damian Gerow]

Thus spake jeff vier (jeff.vier at tradingtechnologies.com) [30/09/03 12:55]:
> So, my question is, is there another way to watch nagios that doesn't
> cause me to have to pile tons of garbage into my filesystem?

Run snmpd.  Configure it to watch for the nagios process.  Every minute or
so, from another machine, check to make sure that the process is running.
Send an alert if it's not.  Send an alert if the connection is refused.
Send an alert if too many processes are running.  You can also monitor
server load this way, to make sure that nagios is running smoothly.

Simple.  Doesn't require another nagios installation.  Should take five
minutes of shell scripting time.  And accomplishes what you want it to.

But this begs the question: what happens when your snmp monitoring fails?
You should update a logfile every time you check, whether successful or not.
Run another process to monitor this logfile.  To be thorough, send an alert
every time this second monitoring process runs.  Use some script on another
machine to differentiate between a 'nagios monitoring process working' and a
'nagios monitoring process broken'.  If it gets a 'broken' update, send a
notice.  If it doesn't get an update, send a notice.

And so on and so forth.  Stop wherever you feel that your system/network/SLA
requirements are met.  This can go on forever, until you effectively run out
of machines, and start having nagios (after a long, long chain) monitor
itself.

Alternatively, and this is just a thought, run nagios under daemontools.  If
it dies, it will start back up again.

  - Damian

-- 
I can't decide if it's sad or funny what a combination of complete lack of
sleep and excessive caffeine do to a persons thought process.


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