Re: Nagios Integration

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Russell Adams <address@hidden> writes:

[About a Central monit app]
> Depends on how complex you want monit to get. With a central server
> administrating remote systems over the network, you get network
> security issues.
> 
> My first impulse is to use rsync or CVS in the "gold server" mentality
> to push out configs. As far as start/stop/restart multiple machines, with
> proper ACL's on the local monit webserver, you could use wget from a
> single central machine to script remote actions.
> 
> An aggregate status for all monits would be a useful feature, but I
> would consider it redundant to the other applications I use to monitor
> uptimes and statistics on all of my machines (Nagios, cricket).
> 
> Perhaps a central monitoring/management app would simply build on your
> integrated webserver commands. That'd be neat. ;]
> 
> 
> Oddly enough, I'll be using monit to ensure Nagios is always
> running. I crashed Netsaint once with a bogus plugin... ;] Hence my
> paranoia.
> 
> Along the thought of a central machine, I think toward a plugin for
> Nagios to query the status of monit on a machine. But then I'm just a
> Nagios buff.
> 
> To elaborate, I use Nagios and SNMP/NSClient/NRPE to check on critical
> processes on remote machines, but only to alert others to the
> problems. Not all the machines could run monit (windoze :P), but those
> that could would save me time and bandwidth by having a single plugin
> call monit and verify everything is running ok, or monit reporting in
> via submitting a passive critical service check when there is a
> problem that it can't resolve.

These arguments got me thinking. I originally proposed a central monit
app, because the idea looked neat and because it seemed like a natural
evolution for monit and also because monit will easily integrate with
such an application. In fact, a central application would be so fun
and easy to write (at least in theory) that it's almost a shame not to.

But I realize that such a central monit application is only going to
part of a niche which is already pretty crowded with programs like Big
Brother, Nagios and others and as Mr. Adams was saying:

> I'm not sure I'd even use a central monitoring app for monit. ;]

That's it, for a central monit app. to actually be interesting for
users it must do what I previously outlined but it must also implement
all the other stuff found in those other programs and even after all
this work it's probably *not* going to "succeed" because users are
already using (religiously) those other well established monitoring
applications. In other words is it worth the effort? I think not, or
at least I'm in doubt.

It's probably more produtive to keep on improving monit in the current
problem domain (which BTW, I think we are doing a good job at). And as
Martin suggested if someone wants to, it's actually very easy to
create a pluggin for monit for those central monitoring applications. 
(I'm not going to do it, since I'm a not big fan of any off those
systems, to put to mildly)

I have also started to have doubts about the need for a central
configuring system for monit (i.e. configure monit from ldap), rsync
for instance can probably do the job easily or what do you think,
Martin?

-- 
Jan-Henrik Haukeland