[chef] Re: Re: Re: Community input needed on the Nagios cookbook

[Jake Vanderdray < >]

Sure.  I will work up a pull request, but if you want something sooner:

in server.rb:

# Additional nodes to be monitored which aren't managed by chef can be added through nagios.additional_hosts attributes

add_nodes = Array.new

add_nodes = node['nagios']['additional_hosts'] if node['nagios'].attribute?('additional_hosts')

# Iterate over the hosts defined in the environment and add them to the hostgroups and nodes

if (add_nodes && !add_nodes.empty?)

  add_nodes.each do |add_node|

    service_hosts[add_node['hostgroups']] = add_node['host_name']

    role_list << add_node['hostgroups'] unless role_list.include? add_node['hostgroups']

  end

end

    In the environments that I have additional servers/devices that I want monitored I add an array of hashes that contain "address", "host_name", and "hostgroups" values.  It looks like this:

"additional_hosts": [

        {

          "address": "192.168.30.72",

          "host_name": "acient",

          "hostgroups": "pillar_app"

        },

        {

          "address": "192.168.30.50",

          "host_name": "elderly",

          "hostgroups": "foundation"

        }

]

In the hosts.cfg.erb template I've added:

###################################################

# Additional Servers

<% @add_nodes.each do |n| -%>

define host {

  use server

  <% n.each do |k,v| %>

  <%= k + " " + v %>

  <% end -%>

}

<% end -%>

I'm sure there is some other change that I'm forgetting, but hope that helps.

Thanks,

Jake.

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 10:57 AM, Tim Smith < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Any chance you could share that clientless code?  I was about to whip something up to handle that exact scenario.  I have a lot of old systems that aren't managed with Chef and probably never will be that I still need to monitor in some fashion.

On 13 August 2012 00:48, Tim Smith < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I'd love to get feedback from the community on the current state of the Nagios cookbook.  Automated monitoring of systems is in my opinion probably the coolest feature of a configuration management systems, and a large number of people are using Nagios.  The Nagios cookbook needed / needs some love though.  I've been doing a lot of work on the cookbook lately since it was lacking functionality I needed and was outright broken in a lot of ways.  I know there's a lot left to do and hopefully you guys can provide some input on what's necessary.

If you used the cookbook and it didn't work for you what problems did you run into?

If you had to modify the cookbook with hard coded values (my biggest issue) for your environment what was lacking that forced you to do this?

In general what would you like to see that isn't there yet?

 

The main problem I have with the nagios cookbook was monitoring systems not covered by chef without hard coding them into recipes or templates for things like firewalls, routers, switches, printers, etc. I ended up hacking the code to support a data_bag "clientless" which I could list items in there and the nagios checks that apply to them.
 

What I've added that hopefully should get merged in the next release cycle:

• Defining Event handlers from data bags
• Optional support for monitoring hosts in multiple environments
• Support for environments with Windows hosts without applying Linux checks that will always fail
• Support for defining nagios host groups from chef search queries stored in data bags
• Install Nagios 3.4.1 not 3.2.3 when installing from source
• Support for installing the server from source, while installing the client from package (if you just want a newer server than Ubuntu packages)
• Fixed source installs of the server to actually work

Look forward to this alot of these are why I am stilled force to run my pre-chef nagios solution as well to cover them.
 

What I still need to get pushed upstream

• Support for installing NRPE via EPEL packages on RHEL distros instead of compiling from source
• Ability to define blacklisted chef environments (preprod/dev) where host/service alerting is disabled
• The Nagios user needs passwordless sudo out of the box to perform most NRPE checks

So if you have some time let me know your experiences

Tim Smith

Operations Engineer, SaaS Operations

M: +1 707.738.8132

TW: @tas50

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