DB store for cfg data

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ed L. wrote:
> I'm looking for a suitable monitoring system, and have recently spent some 
> time evaluating Nagios.  I notice that 1.2 appears to have some support for 
> local storage of cfg data (eg., hosts, groups, contacts, dependencies) in a 
> relational database (pgsql/mysql) as opposed to the flat files in 
> nagios/etc/*.cfg.  A brief glance at the cvs logs since 1.2 seems to 
> suggest it's all been gutted long ago (Dec 2002?), and also appears to be 
> removed from the latest configure script on the cvs trunk.
> 
> Is there a current nagios developer consensus on the value of cfg storage in 
> an RDBMS?  Not worth doing?  Others working on it?  Is it desired?
> 

I think it was axed due to the problems involved in normalizing the 
database for the nagios configuration.

To get the nagios config to 3NF would require a herculanean effort, and 
nobody seems willing to do it until there's a decent web-interface to 
set up the configuration anyway. Ofcourse, it's impossible to write the 
web-interface without having the layout done, so the breakdown comes 
full circle before we even gained momentum.

Besides, adding support for one type of RDBMS would soon raise voices to 
add support for others as well, and that means even more work without 
actually adding functionality.

The GUI for Nagios 2.0 is a whole lot faster anyways (hashing code, 
cached static form object data), so performance is not really an issue, 
and most users are more comfortable with emacs, vi or regular 
expressions than with sql queries for updating their config.


> TIA.
> 
> Ed
> 

-- 
Sourcerer / Andreas Ericsson
OP5 AB
+46 (0)733 709032
andreas.ericsson at op5.se


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