Quick and easy way to monitor Nagios itself?

[Marcus Rejås]

On 09/04 15:08, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
> On 09/04/2009 02:50 PM, Jonathan Call wrote:
> > Since I have a large Nagios distributed system the possibility of a
> > Nagios process going AWOL on one of my many servers is a serious
> > concern. Has anyone come up with a sure way to confirm (i.e. a cron job)
> > that Nagios is processing checks properly? 
> > 
> > For example, I had one OCP_daemon process die, as a result the Nagios
> > process hung for quite some time before it was discovered. Freshness
> > checking is not an option because many hosts are behind firewalls or on
> > private networks and so the central server has active checks disabled
> > globally. 
> > 
> > Jonathan
> 
> See the check_nagios plugin.  One of the parms you can specify is to 
> have it check how long ago it wrote something to its log file.
> 
> We recently had a problem where our Nagios box went down and we never 
> got any notifictions.  So I set up another small Nagios instance whose 
> sole purpose is to monitor the primary instance.  It has just one 
> service check:  check_nrpe calling check_nagios on the main Nagios box 
> to verify that it's up and running.

We have done it in a different way. We have a script (php) at one of hour
servers that updates a file when it is run (it really updates different files
depending on arguments). This script is "touched" every 5 minutes by Nagios
and check_http. The file on the server is checked by a cron-job at that
server that makes sure that we gets alerted if it gets too old.

This way, we are not "only" monitoring that Nagios is running and writing log
files, we are also monitoring that it does its checks as intended.

Regards,

  /Marcus

-- 
Marcus Rejås          jabber:   marcus at jabber.rejas.se  ,= ,-_-. =. 
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Vårgatan 2            web:      http://www.rejas.se     `-'(. .)`-' 
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