Nagios-3

As I wrote earlier, I recently virtualized our nagios. Along with that came a complete " redesign" of how checks are applied. Up till now, I defined checks for each and every single server, thus ending up with ~25 files, each holding roughly 6 checks which are in the same file just sorted by hostname. As you can imagine, it gets quite confusing with that amount of checks (~150). So the last two days I spent on reorganizing (with Visio), on which object/hostgroup placing a check would make sense. Now, this is my first result of two days planning, reorganizing, reordering and moving hosts into different hostgroups. ...

Well, I was playing with the hostgroup inheritance earlier. One problem with that is, if you define a duplicate service Nagios is really unpredictable or rather inconsistent. Now, as Thomas Guyot-Sionnest told me, I should try custom macros for the check definition. So what I did was the following: templates/host-windows.cfg 1 2 3 4 5 define host { name generic-windows register 0 _RDPPORT 3389 } hostgroups/windows.cfg ...

As I wrote some time ago, I was trying to utilize Nagios 3.x’s neat feature of " nested" hostgroups. Well, as it turned out I thought it worked differently; basically like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 define hostgroup { hostgroup_name a-parent-hostgroup alias Our toplevel parent hostgroup } define service { use generic-service check_command check_dummy!0! service_description SSH hostgroup_name a-parent-hostgroup } define hostgroup { hostgroup_name a-child-hostgroup hostgroup_members a-parent-hostgroup alias Our child hostgroup } define service { use generic-service check_command check_dummy!0! service_description LOAD hostgroup_name a-child-hostgroup } As you can cleary see on line 14, I thought you define the relation between two hostgroups in the child hostgroup. The problem with it was basically (as I said in the earlier posts), that all the services defined for the child hostgroups are handed on upwards to the parent hostgroup(s). ...

Recently we purchased a MessPC station for our server room, and my co-worker and myself had the wish it to be integrated within Nagios. Well, so far so good. The first I did was put both keywords into Google. That pretty fast brought up the manufacturer’s page (sorry it’s German only) about the device supporting Nagios by means of either SNMP or a specific plugin called pcmeasure. So I went ahead and tried both ways. ...

Well, it turns out that my thought was ultimativly flawed. When defining the hostgroup_members in the lower tiers, nagios is association the checks from the lower tier with the upper tiers. Thus propagandating all checks upwards, and me ending up with ~250 checks instead of ~150. Gonna have to try to define the dependency backwards, maybe that’ll help. But that’s a topic for Monday. Guess I’ll finish viewing Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex first.