Extending Nagios Beyond Monitoring

[Jon Buys]

Hello,

 I've had an idea, and I thought I'd run it past this list to see what
 came from it.  I'm looking at a configuration and patch management
 solution, so naturally I've been looking at cfengine, bcfg2, and
 puppet.  Each of these has its own positive and negative features, but
 after looking at them what struck me most was the similarity to
 Nagios.

 It seems to me, that at it's core, Nagios simply checks the "state" of
 something (an object?), and reports back, then depending on the state
 of the object that was checked, it runs another script, normally a
 page or email script.  However, I don't think it needs to be an email
 script.  I've been thinking that I could have nagios compare something
 like conf files against a central repository, and if it finds that a
 file on a remote machine is not in sync, run a script to correct the
 file.

 I imagine this concept could be extended to include patches:  check
 the existing rpm version against the version in a central repository,
 if it is out of date run the rpm -U to update the rpm (adjust to suit
 your distro).

 I understand that this is outside the core concept of Nagios as a
 monitoring server, something that it does extremely well.  However, in
 our situation, we already have an existing Nagios infrastructure,
 would it be more worthwhile to extend Nagios or to build an entire new
 infrastructure for yet another management tool?

 So, what do you think?

 Thanks,

 Jon

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/