Nagios Change Config via email

[Breandan Dezendorf]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 5:38 AM, Ron Wilson <ron at tvnz.co.nz> wrote:
> I would like to be able to disable nagios notifications by using email.
>
> Situation is we are investing in automating patching of our servers. The
> patching software can send an email out at the beginning of each server
> patch and another at the end of patch
>
> I want Nagios to be able to receive the email which would have something
> like servername and stop en email subject line.
>
> If I set up an inwards mail client on the nagios server which would receive
> the email and drop it into a directory where Nagios would scan it and
> disable alerting for the server. At the end of patching the patch server
> will issue another email saying servername start and Nagios would receive
> email and re-enable alerting
>
> Anyone got any good ideas how to avhieve this?

Rather than email, it might be a good idea to host a CGI which is
locked down to monitored hosts, and let servers call the CGI as needed
to disable notifications/monitoring for themselves (only) when needed.
 I think this would be *slightly* harder to spoof than an email.
(Email is really bad that way).

For any automated disabling of notifications, the other thing to keep
in mind is: what happens if a server fails in the middle of patching?
Will it sit for hours, waiting?  Depending on your setup, you could
setup a cron job to look for a comment associated with the
server/service, that contains a timestamp.  If the timestamp is longer
than [x] [time] ago, go ahead and turn notifications/alerting back on,
so administrators are notified that something went wrong.

We are doing much of the above with our production systems, and it
works well, especially for the Windows hosts that patch at least once
a month.  Server can call a CGI, and if the server is in the database
(DNS and IP resolve exactly to the name in the DB), it can disable
notifications for itself.  After 45 minutes, if a host is still in
this maintenance state, alerts are enabled again, and we get woken up
as the server needs handholding while we still have a patch window to
do the work in.

-- 
Breandan Dezendorf
breandan at dezendorf.com
bwdezend at gmail.com

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