Distributed monitoring without direct network connection

[Andreas Ericsson]

Nick Lunt wrote:
> Hi folks
> 
> nagios 3.0.5 on RHEL 4u6.
> 
> We have nagios servers all over the uk and we want to get all alerts
> from each nagios server to a central nagios server at our main offices.
> 
> We do not have permanent network connectivity to the remote nagios
> servers so using NSCA is not an option.
> 
> Has anyone any idea of how to overcome this problem ?

Queue the events that were unsendable and send them when it becomes
possible. Merlin is designed to handle frequently failing links with
sometimes extremely long downtimes (it already does this), but it's
not really production level stable yet, so I wouldn't recommend using
it for this (unless you're interested in completing it yourself or
sponsoring me or op5 to do it for you, ofcourse).

More about merlin at http://git.op5.org/git/nagios/merlin.git

pnsca, another module available there, can probably be trivially
rewritten to stash alerts and whatnot with very good performance.

> I am thinking of
> getting the remote nagios servers to send email alerts to an account on
> the central nagios server then trying to get an alert generated based on
> the contents of the email, has anyone tried this before ?
> 
> Or does anyone have any better ideas for solving this problem ?
> 

That depends on what your end-goal is, really. Do you want only one server
to send notifications, or do you want your central server to be able to
generate reports from the data sent in from the slave systems?

If only one server should send notifications, I'd recommend using a solution
with lower latency that gathering everything and shipping it as an email.
One-way UDP communication would be one solution here, I guess, but it does
require the network to be physically present at all times (and there's no
failure detection what so ever, as UDP is a fire-and-forget protocol).
Merlin would help in this case (although it can't send over UDP yet).

If it's for reporting reasons, you'd be better off sending the logfiles as
emails when they're being rotated and then merging them together on the
master server. That means you can't get *accurate* reports more often than
the logs are rotated, but since you'll need to sort-merge them anyways,
that's still going to be a problem.
Neither merlin nor NSCA can help here, I'm afraid, as entries in the logs
would get completely jumbled unless you sort-merge them before taking
generating reports from them.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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