Caching daemon for NRPE and pNSclient

[Andreas Ericsson]

Steve Shipway wrote:
> 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).
> 

Probably due to data-width issues on protocol level.

> 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).
> 

Err... wouldn't that sort of defeat the purpose of checking things? I 
mean, if a check turns out bad, you most likely have a pretty short 
retry-interval, so that means the retries may read cached values. I 
pretty much prefer on-the-fly status info, although I can see why, in 
your case, this would be meaningful (especially if you're running some 
'heavy' checks).

> 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
> 

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


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