Re: Nagios Integration

[Russell Adams]

Really I'm not looking for a tight integration. I'm not sure I'd even
use a central monitoring app for monit. ;]

I'm quite happy with monit being a simple program, without plugins and
the headaches they involve. The idea of requiring extensive syntaxes
and an API to talk to an external program is just too much. The ideas
discussed in that thread were definately overkill.

I'm not sure I'd even like SNMP in monit. Logging to syslog which in
turn goes to my central syslog server and parsed for error messages,
and the built-in email notification cover most of the bases.

I'm using monit as a replacement for daemontools. Its pretty cut and
dry. I want my flakey processes to be restarted if they die. I want
whatever does that linked to init to make sure the monitoring program
can't die either. This helps me assure my services will remain
running. A simple shell script could do the same, and be very
minimalistic at the same time. I chose monit because its small and
effective, though I admit I still think the webserver was overkill. ;]

That being said, all I'd like to do is allow more flexible alerts,
based on running an artibrary command instead of using just
email. That one feature alone would be simply awesome.

This way I could use paging directly like so:

alert `/usr/bin/snpp -m "Monit: $EVENT for $PROGRAM on $HOST" rladams`

or I would have the option of using any other program to pass on the
data as needed. Spawn, exec, launch or whatever the program specified,
and terminal the child process if it fails to exit in less than 90 seconds.

No plugin architecture, no XML, no SNMP, just a call out to a shell
command.

Comments? I know I'm being a bugger. ;]

Russell

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 09:48:57PM +0100, Jan-Henrik Haukeland wrote:
> 
> We have had this discussion before and decided against it. See:
> 
> http://mail.nongnu.org/archive/html/monit-general/2002-09/msg00007.html
> 
> Ps. But we *are* going to provide a centralized application which will
> poll information from monit instances installed on different machines
> so you can look at *one* screen to check the status of your machines
> and look at statistics and so on. Much like systems like Big Brother,
> Nagios and others. But the design will be simpler, easier to use and
> much less spaghetti than those systems. 
> 
> It's on our todo list as item 3: http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/next.html
> 
> 
> Russell Adams <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > I'm a big network tools buff, and use Netsaint/Nagios, cricket, and
> > other fun programs to monitor everything around me.
> > 
> > So here's my next funky question.
> > 
> > I'd love to signal Nagios or other programs about monit events.
> > 
> > The email interface is great, but in addition I'd love the ability to
> > call an arbitrary program with arguments. Presumably the arguments
> > would include the $EVENT, $PROGRAM, $DATE, and $HOST variables in
> > different arrangements. 
> > 
> > Were that the case, I could use Netsaint/Nagio's passive alerts to
> > receive and centrally store issues reported by monit.
> > 
> > Yes, I could setup a long tricky chain parsing the email in procmail,
> > etc, but I figure this should be an easy addon.
> > 
> > Comments?
> > 
> > Russell
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > To unsubscribe:
> > http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monit-general
> 
> -- 
> Jan-Henrik Haukeland
> 
> 
> --
> To unsubscribe:
> http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monit-general