Nagios and DB support.

[Andreas Ericsson]

Scott Sanders wrote:
> Ben wrote:
> 
>> Well, you must do what you feel is right, of course, but....
>>
>> Any solution you come up with would probably include alerting, and I've
>> found that Nagios is excellent at alerting. It's not so hot at running
>> historical reports or making trend reports, but I've got two things to 
>> say
>> about that. First, nagios can gather its metrics from your historical
>> trending tools, so you get both. Second, nagios 2 has NEB modules, which
>> you can use to send data to your historical trending tools, so you can 
>> get both going the other way too. It's flexible.
>>  
>>
> Sure, and this is probably what I will end up having to do for the time
> being. Don't get me wrong, I think nagios is great, it just seems that
> version 2 will hanicap it more than anything else. The flexibility
> should extend beyond just allowing you define custom checks and custom
> notify-by's. I would like to be flexible in how I store this data too.

So write a NEB module. There are examples, and I'm sure Ben would be 
delighted to have someone help him with his project.

> Heres an idea; leave the storage and logging functions seperate. Treat
> this backside of nagios like a module also, so we aren't forced to save
> everything in files and can write our own storage methods.
> 

This has been suggested and rejected before (by me actually). I believe 
that was mostly due to the fact that it is a rather major change in the 
code without any real value without even more code.

>> Personally, I don't think it makes sense to have one tool that does
>> everything. The concept of small tools that do their job well and can
>> interact with other tools is what gives unix so much of its power, and I
>> don't see any reason to stop applying that concept when it comes to
>> monitoring, alerting, or trend analysis.
>>  
>>
> I couldn't agree more. Small tools also have the big advantage of being
> able to be upgraded independently. But as it currently is, all nagios
> does is collect data from a number of tools through its check functions
> and report them with other tools (read qpage, etc.).

Have you even looked at the GUI part of Nagios?

> The config files,
> escalations,  and the ability to group hosts/services/contacts, etc. are
> what makes nagios so powerful. I don't want to get away from using
> smaller tools, I just want a better way to manage everything. If someone
> made a php frontend that incorperated nagios, cacti, ntop, and snort it
> would be a huge benefit to the IT community.

Apart from snort, that's exactly what we have done. Our customers seem 
very happy with it.

> However, I think nagios can
> do all of this itself with only minor changes, so why not continue to
> expand nagios until it meats everyones needs?
> 

Because of the flexibility of the plugins. I've said this before; 
Digital checks aren't made for graphing, but they're crucial for network 
monitoring. This means you'd have to add extra variables just to decide 
which to graph, and then you'd have to standardize plugin output. I 
suggest you read up on perfparse and other Nagios add-ons for graphing, 
as it already does this (to some extent).

If you want native graphing ability that bad, I suggest you sit down and 
write a patch for Nagios. Ethan almost always commits a good written 
patch that does something a lot of users want. This is also what 
opensource is all about; Giving users the option to make additions and 
have those included in future releases.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


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