Nagios external commands (2)

[Tobias Mucke]

Hi Andreas,

thanks for your reply.

What I want to achieve is to write a program which is able to write
External Commands into the Nagios External Command Interface. Is there
such a program yet? I did not found one.
But I don't want to hardcode all the External Commands and the needed
options, escpecially if there are new External Commands from time to
time or existing ones are changing, I don't want to change my code.
So my first step is to describe all external commands in a XML
structure. Second step will be to write code using this XML file to
understand which commands are possible and which options are needed,
so it can check the input from the user and write the correct command
into the pipe.

Working with the External Commands documentation at nagios.org I got
the impression that it is written manually and stored in some kind of
content management system. With a XML file describing the Nagios
External Command Interface you could generate the documentation e.g.
by XSLT.
Why should you do that? Because it would be possible to send patches
for the documentation in a program understandable diff format.

Future use, e.g. for XML-RPC or some other sort of interface:

Thinking of a distributed monitoring environment you need a central
console for it. We have such a setup here and it works fine. We are
using the webinterface of the central monitoring system right now.
This system also does notifications and escalations.
Actually we are going to work on a concept for an even more
distributed environment. Right now all distributed monitoring systems
are located at one datacenter location. But we want to roll out Nagios
to other datacenters at remote locations too. The idea is to give the
remote datacenter as much as autonomy as possible e.g. keep
notifications local at each location.
Nethertheless we want just one central console to control the Nagios
infrastructure, for example to enable / disable notifications. So you
have to control Nagios by an interface you can send commands to from a
central system. These commands should be checked if they are correct
before they are passed into the pipe.

Other projects, e.g. Xen, are solving this by a XML-RPC interface
which is easy to implement.
Actually I don't know the NEB and its possibilities but I thought the
PIPE will vanish into thin air in Nagios 3.0. So this is not a
bottleneck anymore.

Thanks.

Tobias

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