Monitoring large (ish) numbers of servers with exceptions to the rules...

[Matthew Macdonald-Wallace]

Hi All,

I currently help maintain and monitor around 50 servers across various
parts of the UK using Nagios 2.  At the moment, we have a configuration
file for each host (%hostname%.cfg) and in that file we specify all the
services for the named host.

We are trying to reduce the number of configuration files as we take on
more and more servers becuase there are a large number checks that we
need to be rolled out to all servers and we feel that we are
duplicating our workload.

I'm open to ideas on how to achieve this however my thoughts were a
setup along the lines of the following:

 - A "master" host template is created in which all services are defined
   for a host.

 - If a check does not need to be run for a given host (for example it
   is not a web server), a stanza is added to that particular host's
   config file that effectively tells nagios "don't check for this
   service on this host"

I've tried defining all the services in a master templates file and
this works perfectly however when I come to exclude certain services, I
am at a loss on how to do it.

Initially I tried adding a stanza with the same service name and
"register 0" as one of the options, however this didn't work.

We have used HostGroups in the past to achieve a similar goal, however
we ran into the issue that whilst we need to check the CPU Usage on all
of the servers, a few of the servers that we monitor can take a lot
more of a beating than the majority.  This lead to us defining the CPU
checks on a per-host basis as if we defined it separately from the
hostgroup for the more powerful servers we we presented with a load of
errors regarding duplicate service names.

I hope I've made myself clear on what we're after and I look forward to
receiving your input on this.

Kind regards,

Matt
-- 
Matt Wallace
matthew at truthisfreedom.org.uk
http://www.truthisfreedom.org.uk/

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