Is this possible: Debugging Nagios -- logging commands and their exit codes.

[Jan Bessels]

Using Nagios 2.1. When adding things to the .cfg files sometimes things
go wrong. The output of a plugin is then for example  'No output'. This
is NOT very usefull at all. It would be usefull to see which cmd is
really being executed. Am I missing here something or.....

Older msgs on the mailinglist (don't know for which versiion) suggest
trying to log things usings commands like 'ps -efU<nagios PID> or top
and putting things in a logfile. Doesn't workl that well for me.

The only thing I can come up with is the following. Hopefully you can
provide me with a better solution.....

Extending the command_line option for a command.

define command {
     command_name check_ping
     command_line  <command_to_exec>
}

When I change  it to the following I get things logged in a logfile

define command {
     command_name check_ping
   command_line  /bin/echo "<command_to_exec> " >> /tmp/ping.log
}

Of course this is NOT a very good solution. Though  the commands you
want to log is added to the logfile but the command is NOT executed. 
UNFORTUNATELY the following is NOT possible.

command_line  <command_to_exec> ; echo "<command_to_exec> " >>
/tmp/ping.log

Everything after the ; is removed be Nagios (checked objects.cache). 

The only thing I can imagine which hopefully  wil do the trick is the
followig.

define command {
     command_name check_ping
     command_line /user/home/jbessels/log_and_exec_cmd.sh
"<command_to_exec> " 
}

The log_and_exec_cmd.sh script should do the following:

Parse the commandline args  supplied to  log_and_exec_cmd.sh  to get
the cmd to execute (will be called $cmd)
echo "$cmd" >> /tmp/logfile
execute $cmd and store contents in pluginoutput variable
store exit code of cmd run in returncode variable
echo $pluginoutput variable >> /tmp/logfile

echo $pluginout 
exit $returncode

The last two lines are crucial I think. Because command_line has to
return an ascii string and and exitcode.

Does perhaps anyone have created such a script. If so I would be VERY
happy if you could supply me with it. Haven't that much time to figure
it all out......

If what I do is nonsense and can be accomplished in a better way I
would like to know also.....

PS.  I had hoped Nagios would have had support for this kind of things
out of the box, but maybe I didn't RTFM thoroughly enough.....

Grtz,
Jan Bessels






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