check_log not working properly

Jim Mozley jim.mozley at exponential-e.com
Thu Feb 12 12:20:43 CET 2004


Neil wrote:

> Jim Mozley writes:
> 
>> Based on fictitious example for monitoring sonet network events using 
>> syslog (I have a plugin to do this via SNMP but the principle is the 

... <snip explanation> ...

>> is one unified set of notification mechanisms, etc. Otherwise using 
>> just swatch (email alerts for instance) you have a second system to 
>> administer.
> 
> 
> First of all, thanks for the explanation above. I got your idea 
> although, I am a little lost. If it's alright with you, can you provide 
> me with a sample entry of each line for each configuration files. You 
> can obscure the ip addresses if there are any listed. You also mentioned 
> on the other emails that you can provide me with syslog-ng conf too. Is 
> it ok too? :)
> This will speed me up about understanding how this process works.
> Thanks.
> Neil

Better late than never I hope. The following is a setup for using 
syslog-ng, swatch and a script to pass passive events into Nagios. This 
is based on getting syslog messages from a set of network devices, 
although the same principle would apply to hosts. I've tried to make the 
example fairly generic, for instance we generate the nagios config for 
this automatically from device configurations, so please don't 
copy/paste this without understanding what's going on.

1. Define services in Nagios. For instance if you want to monitor MPLS 
messages for each network device define an MPLS service as below.

#Service definition template
define service{
         name                            mpls-service-template
         active_checks_enabled           no
         passive_checks_enabled          1
         parallelize_check               1
         obsess_over_service             0
         check_freshness                 0
         freshness_threshold             28800
         notifications_enabled           1
         event_handler_enabled           1
         flap_detection_enabled          1
         process_perf_data               1
         retain_status_information       1
         retain_nonstatus_information    1
         register                        0
         is_volatile                     1
         check_period                    none
         max_check_attempts              1
         normal_check_interval           5
         retry_check_interval            1
         contact_groups                  network-admins
         notification_interval           120
         notification_period             24x7
         notification_options            w,c,r
         }

define service{
         use             mpls-service-template         ; template
         host_name       host1
         service_description             mpls
         check_command   ""
         }


2. Configure syslog-ng. Once you have got your config file ready you 
will need to disable the native syslog daemon and start syslog-ng.

syslog-ng config; this is for Solaris the source may need to change for 
linux/BSD:

options {
         keep_hostname(off);
         long_hostnames(off);
         sync(1);
         log_fifo_size(2048);
         bad_hostname("%");
         };

source all {
         sun-stream("/dev/log" door("/etc/.syslog_door"));
         internal();
         udp();
};


# Put each day's log in a separate file within a directory for
# each host.
destination d_hosts {
         file("/var/log/hosts/$HOST/$HOST-$YEAR$MONTH$DAY"
         owner(root) group(syslog) perm(0660) dir_perm(0750) 
create_dirs(yes));
};


# To send messages to swatch
destination d_swatch {
         program("/usr/local/bin/swatch --config-file=/etc/swatchrc 
--read-pipe=\
"cat /dev/fd/0\"");
};


# log all messages in a directory per host
log {
         source(all);
         destination(d_hosts);
};

# send all logs to swatch
log {
         source(all);
         destination(d_swatch);
};



3. Install and configure swatch.

Sample line from swatchrc

watchfor /pattern-i-want-to-match/
         exec /path/to/my/script.pl $*

So for instance if you are looking out for MPLS messages and your 
devices include "MPLS" in these syslog message match the pattern /MPLS/

4. Create the script

This should build a passive command based on the contents of the syslog 
message.

For instance it might contain element such as:

if ( $syslogmsg =~ /down/ ) {
	$nagios_code = 2; # Critical
}

You will need to extract the hostname from the syslog message (and 
possibly the service unless this is hardcoded - it is in this example).

In the end you want to build a message such as:

my $cmd = "[$epoch] 
PROCESS_SERVICE_CHECK_RESULT;$host;$service;$nagios_code;$msg";

And fire it into nagios:

my $echo = '/usr/bin/echo';
my $pipe = '/usr/local/nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd';

system "$echo \"$cmd\" >> $pipe";

(As an aside I tried the perl way of doing this rather than a system 
command and had a problem on Solaris I couldn't resolve.)

I would recommend you take a look at Al Toby's module on CPAN for 
passing commands to Nagios.

There are also some shell script examples of passing Nagios commands 
supplied with the distribution.

Jim





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