Why are there "commands"?

[David Dyer-Bennet]

On Fri, August 28, 2009 13:26, Marc Powell wrote:
>
> On Aug 28, 2009, at 12:18 PM, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
>
>> I don't really understand the purpose / utility of the "command"
>> level of
>> abstraction in Nagios configuration.  (2.10; we're still on Centos
>> 4.7).
>>
>> To define a new service to check particular Windows web services we've
>> written, I define a service, and then it has to refer to a command,
>> and
>> over in the command I have to hard-code the parameters needed to
>> test this
>> specific service -- so in fact I need a separate command for each
>> service.
>
> Can you give an example? I think you just don't know the flexibility
> that is available.

That seems to be the case.

> You shouldn't need to hard code much except those
> things that are constant. Nagios has extensive macro capabilities and
> allows you to pass much data from service definitions and other parts
> of nagios to the commands being run. This allows you to re-use generic
> command definitions between many different services that check similar
> things. Have you read the Macro documentation, particularly passing
> arguments to commands?

I had no idea that "macros" described something having to do with command
arguments, and the examples I saw looked very limited and were all
involved with user names and passwords.

>> As a broader question, are there documents that give more of a logical
>> overview of Nagios, explaining how and why things are broken up and
>> how they work together?
>
> The published Documentation? Beyond that, ask specifics but be sure
> you've read the documentation first.

I tried to find anything relevant on commands in the published
documentation, and didn't find anything suggesting the possibility of
command-line arguments, so I thought I'd checked and found it wasn't
possible.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info


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