Sending and monitoring email

[Marc Powell]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-bounces at lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:nagios-users-
> bounces at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Mark McWhinney
> Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 12:28 PM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Sending and monitoring email
> 
> Pardon the newbie question, but I need to know if Nagios will do what
I
> need before investing time and effort in it.
> 
> I need to monitor an email sync management system where I send an
email
> to the server and measure the time it takes to get synced to a device.
> The email send is SMTP.  The receive is an HTTP push to the device.
> 
> Can Nagios be set up to
> - wake up every five minutes
> - send an email
> - start a transaction timer
> - go into a passive wait for an HTTP message
> - get and process the HTTP message
> - stop the timer and report the time difference?

Yes, if you can code everything from 'send an email' on as a plugin in
your favorite language. Nagios must be able to perform those actions by
running an external script/program (i.e. plugin). There's no standard
plugin that does anything like that except check_email_loop.pl which
sends an e-mail, then on the next run verifies that it was received in a
POP account. You could use that as a model.

I think your only sticky-wicket is listening on port 80 for the HTTP
response but I can't say for sure not being familiar with the system
you're working with. I assume that the whole transaction takes less than
a minute or so. If it's longer, you might want to have the HTTP listener
run separately as a daemon and log to a file on receipt and on your next
run of the plugin, verify that the previous transaction was received.

> If so, would you be kind enough to point me to the features of Nagios
> that I would need to set up the email send and passive HTTP wait?

http://nagiosplug.sf.net - Developer Guidelines and examining how the
check_email_loop.pl plugin works would probably be a start.

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