Caching daemon for NRPE and pNSclient

[Steve Shipway]

Hello everyone.

Some background -
Here, we use both NRPE and pNSclient to get stats for our UNIX and Windows
servers, and these agents are queried by both our Nagios installation, and
also by our MRTG setup.  These systems are both duplicated onto separate
hosts for resiliance. As a result, we get a lot of (duplicate) queries being
sent to the agents. 

So, I have written (in Perl at this stage) a daemon that runs on a server,
and proxies queries to both NRPE and pNS.  Responses are cached for a
configurable time, so that subsequent requests are replied to immediately.
Also, this can pre-emptively go and request data from agents so as to give
faster response times.  There is a check_cache Nagios plugin (that can also
produce the output in MRTG plugin format) that allows querying of the data
via the cache.

The pNS agent is queried directly by perl, the NRPE agent is queried by
forking off check_nrpe (since I seem unable to implement check_nrpe in pure
perl, for some reason).

The next plan is to make the plugin be intelligent enough to support a
failover caching daemon, so that loss of the daemon is not the end of all
monitoring (provided you have a standby daemon already running).

The question -
Has anyone done something like this already?  Does anyone find this
interesting/useful?  Would anyone like to play with a rough v0.1 beta with
sparse documentation and help out in the development?  Any suggestions for
other agents or plugins it should support? Does anyone have a (working)
check_nrpe written in pure perl that I can copy?

Thanks in advance for your time,

Steve

---
Steve Shipway: ITSS, University of Auckland
Email: s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz  Web: http://www.steveshipway.org/  
** We can only discover new oceans when we have the **
** courage to lose sight of the shore.              **
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