5 Nagios General Questions

[Marc Powell]

On Oct 22, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Goutos, Kevin wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a few general Nagios questions for you all, I appreciate any
> feedback you can provide.
>
>
> 1) I don't think I'm restarting Nagios correctly whenever I make a
> change in a one of the configuration files.  I'm using
> /usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -d /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg as  
> well
> as /etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios reload, restart, stop, start ,etc.

The first starts a new instance of nagios and the second reloads or  
reloads that new instance. If you do both, in that order, it does  
nothing for the *original* running version of nagios, which continues  
to run. You end up with two or more concurrently running versions of  
nagios, each with possibly different configurations in memory. Use  
only the init.d restart or reload. To 'fix' where you are now, stop  
nagios, use 'ps' and 'kill' to stop any running copies you have and  
restart nagios.

> 2) For my notifications, I'm not seeing anything in the body of the
> message.  All I see is the Message name "** PROBLEM Host Alert: CORP- 
> NSS
> is DOWN **".  I'm pretty sure there should be more information in the
> body.. any ideas?

Without seeing the actual notification command definition in question,  
we can only say to look at it and make sure that the macros you are  
using for it are valid for your version of nagios.

> 3) I've seen a couple plugins on a few sites I might want to check  
> out,
> how do I go about installing them?  I didn't find any documentation  
> for
> installing them..

Typically just copy them to the libexec directory and create  
appropriate command{} definitions for them. Hopefully the plugin  
author provides enough information or plugin --help to figure it out.  
Otherwise, your understanding how the current plugin <-> command{}  
definition <-> service{} definition relationship works is usually  
enough to know what to do. Read through the nagios documentation;  
it'll be worth it in the long term.

> 4) I'm looking for more ways to monitor our Routers and Switches here.
> Currently all I have is service checks of 'Ping Test' and 'System
> Uptime'.  I also saw on the quickstart guide the following service
> check, but I'm seeing errors.  The IP address there looks wrong, and
> it's saying it can't find a log.
>
> define service{
> 	use			generic-service
> 	hostgroup_name	switches
> 	service_description	Check Local Traffic
> 	check_command
> check_local_mrtgtraf!/var/lib/mrtg/192.168.1.253_1.log!AVG! 
> 1000000,20000
> 00!5000000,5000000!10
> }

This plugin requires that you're already running the MRTG program  
(completely unrelated to Nagios) to pre-cache the results. It's simply  
reading the traffic usage from the MTRG log file, not from the router.  
Are you running MRTG and pointing it to the correct and existing log  
file (/var/lib/mrtg/192.168.1.253_1.log)? Are the permissions such  
that the nagios user can read it?

> 5) What other service checks do people use to monitor their switches  
> and
> routers?  We have SNMP enabled on them and want to collect more
> information through Nagios.

Ping, a bunch of custom checks (BGP peering, multi-interface checks,  
etc) for Nagios. We use Cricket for all utilization graphing/trending.

--
Marc


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