[chef] Re: Re: How to monitor if chef-client is actually working

[Rob Guttman < >]

I monitor the chef-client log via nagios nrpe (active check) for two purposes: (1) check the log's last modified time to know whether the service is running correctly, and (2) report multi-line log errors.  The problem with just monitoring the chef-client (or any process) via a check_proc command (or comparable) is that the process could be running but wedged.  Ensuring that the process is continually writing to its log, while not perfect, goes a bit further to make sure the process is not wedged.

Getting nrpe to report multiple lines takes a bit of work as that's not standard - but it is possible (whereas it's not possible at all AFAIK via nsca passive checks).  I can dig up my notes on how I did this if people are interested.

- Rob

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 1:44 AM, Ranjib Dey < "> > wrote:

We use nagios as our alerting/monitoring solution and i have written an nsca based chef report handler that submits the chef client run status via send_nsca command to a nsca server (which in turn submits a passive check on the nagios.cmd pipe). It assumes nsca-client is installed on the chef client nodes and nsca daemon is running (and configured ) on the nagios box.
You can get the script here:  https://github.com/ranjibd/nsca_handler

You can also use nrpe based active checks, but i guess that will introduce some delay, but also helps you detecting in case the client crashes (which im experiencing with ruby 1.9.2 )
regards
ranjib

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Robert Keng < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone knows if there is a way to monitor chef-client to make sure it isn't stuck in retries because of some error in some recipe? Does the client actually reply back to the chef-server if its able to apply all recipes and things are happy?

I apologize if this is a really simple question, fairly new to chef...Just I'd rather not have to parse /var/log/chef/client.log for this, thanks!

-Robert