[chef] Re: Re: Monitoring knife-lastrun?

On Sat, 09 Jun 2012, Steffen Gebert wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> thanks for your quick replies!
> 
> I'm unsure, whether knife-lastrun is a perfect start. The optimum solution 
> would be, if it wouldn't only save to node data, but also to write results 
> into files. I would then pick these up through zabbix agent.
> 
> Do you know some report handler that does already exactly this?
 

hi. we use zabbix where i work. from each node i'm reporting the chef-client
status to zabbux using zabbix-sender from a chef report handler. i based my
code on this gentleman's handler:

https://github.com/ranjibd/nsca_handler/blob/master/nsca_handler.rb

i modified it to fit zabbix bits. when the client node sends its status,
0 good, non-zero bad, it does basically:

zabbix-sender_binary -s host001 -c /etc/zabbix.conf -z zabbix-server.foo.com 
-k chef_client[status] -o $CHEF_CLIENT_EXIT_STATUS 

on the zabbix server i also do a freshness check. if the server hasn't heard
from a client in X period, alert.

HTH,
kallen



> @Tetsu
> I read about Grill and also the other dashboard here in the lists. But I 
> prefer to have it integrated in our existing monitoring.
> 
> Thanks
> Steffen
> 
> On 09.06.2012, at 18:50, Daniel Schauenberg wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > wouldn't report and exception handlers be the better choice here? Sounds 
> > like using knife lastrun is just adding complexity?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Daniel
> > 
> > On Jun 9, 2012, at 12:45 PM, Tetsu Soh wrote:
> > 
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> May be different from what you are asking, we are using Grill to monitor 
> >> Chef run status.
> >> It has a good GUI with alter and report feature and very easy to setup.
> >> 
> >> You can get a trial version to try Grill out.
> >> 
> >> Regards,
> >> 
> >> Tetsu
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On 6/10/12 1:17 AM, Steffen Gebert wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>> 
> >>> I want to monitor the output of knife-lastrun (to check execution time 
> >>> + failed runs).
> >>> 
> >>> Is anyone of you already doing this (we're using Zabbix, but I would 
> >>> say this fact doesn't matter..).
> >>> 
> >>> Do you see any other way than:
> >>> *) give the client on our monitoring station chef admin privileges to 
> >>> retrieve the values via knife (<- bad idea..)
> >>> *) modify the knife-lastrun gem to write stats into a local file 
> >>> (however I have no clue, how to do this - I'm not a ruby guy :().
> >>> *) or does knife-lastrun already write stats to a local file? However 
> >>> the code looks like it only writes to log and saves to the node.
> >>> 
> >>> Would be nice, if someone could help me!
> >>> 
> >>> Yours
> >>> Steffen
> >> 
> >> 
> >