Monitoring in a Heterogeneous Environment [was Re: [Nagios-users] check_memory]

[John Warburton]

Hi All

I would like to point out that whilst Nagios is "designed to run under 
Linux" (http://www.nagios.org/about.php), that many people use Nagios to 
monitor other variants of Unix.

I think I am like a few others here, who have come from a Big Brother 
monitoring background. The mind set of the plugin developers at BB is 
that the plugins would work under many different operating systems. OS 
specific stuff is flagged.

I come over to Nagios to see mainly Linux specific stuff that is not 
flagged as being Linux specific. For example, the contrib memory 
checking plugins (contrib/check_mem.pl and 
contrib/tarballs/check_memory.tgz) are Linux specific. The C code is 
obvious and won't compile anywhere else, but the perl script and the 
script submitted by Trevor below have problems:

1. They ignore the man page for vmstat which says "The first report 
produced gives averages since the last reboot." i.e. You need to look at 
a second sample from vmstat (e.g. vmstat 1 2) to get a valid result.

2. Linux (2.4.26 for me http://www.rt.com/man/vmstat.8.html), AIX 
(http://eservercomputing.com/ibmunix/articles/index.asp?sid=19&id=847&pageID=914) 
and Solaris (http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?vmstat+1M) all have 
differing outputs in columns from vmstat.

So, Trevor's script below will work only on AIX. It will be wrong for 
Linux & Solaris. contrib/check_mem.pl will be wrong (idle & buffer memory).

So, what am I trying to say?

1. File a bug report for contrib/check_mem.pl as it is wrong for Linux & 
Solaris (at least).

2. Request that *all* plugins have some sort of #ifdef OS in them, and 
try to work in multiple environments. check_disk.c is an excellent 
example here.

3. Look to Big Brother as a guide to heterogeneous monitoring. The 
memory script (http://www.deadcat.net/viewfile.php?fileid=804) is an 
excellent example. Question - these are released under the GPL. Can 
these be quickly hack for Nagios (with proper acknowledgment of the 
authors) of course?

Comments? Constructive criticisms? Flames > /dev/null.

John

On 1/02/2005 7:04 PM, Trevor Warren wrote:

> Fellas!!!,
> 
>   My script for check_mem on aix and gnu/linux.
> 
> ##########
> 
> bash-2.05a# cat /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_mem.sh
> #!/usr/bin/bash
> 
> avm=`vmstat | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $3}'`
> fre=`vmstat | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $4}'`
> 


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