[naemon-dev] Dynamic Object Creation / Group Alerts

[Lee Wilson]

Evening All,
I was wondering if any more work is being done on dynamic service creation and possible more advanced alerting?  The areas of auto-configuration and gathering of status from compound services has always been a weakness of Nagios and certainly prevented me getting it adopted by less willing employers.
I'm very keep to see the core of Naemon s kept as minimal as possible but to provide some of these features, perhaps a cooperating addon would help. 
I've been thinking that having something like an inventory service for solving the problem of interfaces or other dynamic services. This starts of as a parent service that Naemon is aware of. When it's run it runs as a normal service check that collects all the data and reports back success/failure.  In addition it talks to an additional daemon that processes the inventory (maybe in the form of XML/JSON data) and creates new services which would then be checked by Naemon as normal.
I doubt all the info could be contained in the perfdata output and it probably shouldn't either, than can be left for more summary/basic info (such as time to run check, number of interfaces found, etc).   These dynamic services wouldn't be deleted automatically by default as that is upto the administrator.  Biggest issue I see with this is having to get the plugins rewritten to handle it and also needing to have a server side element (even if just some kind of parser script) to the plugin to process the data.
Being a network engineer, I do tend to focus on the likes of interfaces (especially switches as they rather long winded to add) etc it equally could apply for enumerating windows services, load balancer pools, etc. The service checks could also be configured with filtering capabilities (such as exclude 'this', only include starting with 'x', etc).
For dealing with compound services (such as 3 out of 5 HTTP services have failed in the last hour), this would probably need something that can process the recent service check output and notice patterns.  In traditional Nagios this could use NDO and have the addon read the DB data every x minutes but I guess MKLiveStatus could do the same thing. For each compound alert that is created potentially a service check is created allowing it be ran on schedule but I'd be concerned this would put unnecessary load on the main naemon process, a seperate addon could even be run on an entirely different server if MkLiveStatus is available over the network.
My last 2 employers have wanted features like this (especially the last one) so unfortunately I've never been able to get them to adopt Nagios/Naemon but I keep trying. Am I correct in saying that it's not possible to alert based on the status of a host/service group and they are mainly just for display purposes?
This is just my early brain dump on the idea without needing to change any of the core Naemon functionality. Would be interested in any feedback.
Lee
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