nagios usage/question...

[Sean Dilda]

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 09:47, bruce wrote:
> hi...
> 
> i'm starting to evaluate various monitoring apps for a possible project.
> nagios appears to be overkill in some areas, deficient in others for my
> projected needs. i'm curious, how easy is it to add functionality (ie
> plugins) to the nagios infrastructure? in other words, is it possible/easy
> to create perl scripts that might communicate with a client script/app on a
> client machine, and suck the results into nagios for display.

I find it hard to think of nagios as overkill for almost anything. 
Nagios is merely a framework for doing the monitoring.  As for adding
plugins, its extremely easy.  To nagios, a 'plugin' is really just an
non-GUI executable.  All the plugin has to do is take arguments to tell
it what host to check (and any other options you want to supply), then
give back a one-line summary of the problems it may or may not of
encountered.  And the plugin has to user a certain set of exit codes in
order to indicate to nagios what state the service/host is in.

> 
> some of my initial needs are:
> - linux/apache monitoring server

The standard set of plugins includes a check_http, which sounds like
what want.

> - monitor linux client servers
> - monitor linux client apps

Those two are very vague.  But Nagios does work well with linux.

> - ability to add/remove monitoring scripts/functions

Definately.  All configurable.

> - hopefully perl based

Nagios is written in C.  Plugins are written in whatever language you
want.  A large number of the standard plugins are written in perl.

> - ability to detect status of client server/processes

If the plugin doesn't exist, that turns into your ability to write a
plugin to check the status.  There is a plugin called 'check_proc'
that'll tell you if a process is running or not.

> - ability to derive status of inter-client communication
>   (not just client-server, but client-client as well)

That's iffy.. as I'm not sure your exact needs, it may come down to your
ability to be able to write the appropriate plugin.

> - ability to perform remote admin of some client apps

Nagios has a nice event handler setup.  This allows you to run an
arbitrary script/program when a service/host changes state.  For
instance if it detects the webserver is down, you can have the event
handler run a script to try to start the webserver up again.

> - some level of alert functionality

Nagios has a wide variety of alert options, including escalations.  All
of them are widely configurable.

> - ability to add additional client monitoring scripts/functionality

I think you covered this one already.  In any case, you can add checks
for whatever you want. 

> - user based permission strategy for conducting monitoring
>   functions. (ie allow certain users, to perform certain functions...)

The nagios cgis do allow you to restrict who can see host/service detail
based on who is listed as contacts for them.  I believe it also allows
them to set downtime windows, etc.  And nagios uses standard http
authentication, which allows you to easily plugin to various
authentication schemes.



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