Nagios showcase project !

[Matt Pounsett]

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Sean Perry wrote:

> One of the things that drove me crazy about the nagios cfg format is 
> there is so much duplication.  This lets me easily define and change 
> machines and not forget to update one of the files.

I haven't been following the Nagios 2.0 discussions at all.. but perhaps this
is something for the devo group to look at, if they aren't/haven't already.

It seems like steps were made with 1.0 toward inheritance, with the template
system... this has certainly improved the readability of config files, but
defining new hosts is still not as quick and easy as it could be.

With some slight rearrangement of the relationship between host and service
definitions we could have a proper inheritance system that would make a lot of
this much easier to deal with.

For example, if a host's services and extinfo were part of the host
definition, it would be easy to define new servers.. 

1) define templates for the various services you want checked
2) define a generic host template which includes common services such as PING,
   SSH, disk and memory checks... maybe also a set of Windows and UNIX host
   templates that inherit the generic host and modify or add to those
   services..

Then, all you need to add new hosts is define a host with its unique name and
IP Address, inherit the proper generic server type.  The only services or
other information one would need to define are those which are unique to that
host.  For larger installations, one might add another layer of templates and
define generic web servers, mail servers, etc.

In short, I envision each of the current object definitions remaining as they
are except for the 'service' and 'host' definitions... 'service' would no
longer relate a service to a particular host, but simply relate a service name
to the relevant command.  The host definition would need a new directive which
adds a service to that host or host template.  

There's probably a better place for this discussion... and perhaps it's too
late to consider changes to the config format for 2.0.. but I thought I'd
share my thoughts anyway.

Cheers, all.
   Matt

-- 
Matt Pounsett                 CIRA - Canadian Internet Registration Authority
Technical Support Programmer                    350 Sparks Street, Suite 1110
matt.pounsett at cira.ca                                 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
613.237.5335 ext. 231                                      http://www.cira.ca



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