Netsaint to Nagios

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Sir,

I am writing to thank you for your letter and say,

On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 08:48:49AM +0100, Tom DE BLENDE wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Since Nagios is stable now (yeah, yeah, I know it is for a while now.)

- not all that long 24/11/2002

> I would like to have a closer look at it. Is there any risk in
> installing it on the same box Netsaint is running on?
>

Here are some thoughts and observations :-

0 I too hummed and hawed over this until realising that all the action
is happening with Nagios.

'Upcoming' sounds wonderful ( http://www.nagios.org/upcoming.php )

For example, the quoted argument patch for embedded Perl has
already been committed to Nagios. It won't be for Netsaint (
http://www.nagios.org/faqs/viewfaq.php?faq_id=90 )

1 Fine to have Netsaint and Nagios on the same box subject to the box
tolerating the load of two (2) Netsaint processes (in my _limited_
experience Nagios seems to have a load average of 5-10% less than
Netsaint)

2 However,

. you may have non standard plugins with embedded paths in them (Tsk
tsk) - for storing state information etc
 
. you may  do checks with Netsaint by ssh so you'll have to add a nagios
user to those boxes you want to check by ssh and make sure that the
nagios user home directory has the same .ssh as the Netsaint user

. you probably want to adopt the new template configuration method
(although you probably can run Nagios - if you configure it
appropriately - to use your Netsaint stuff).

You may find  http://www.nagios.org/faqs/viewfaq.php?faq_id=89 useful (I
converted semi automatically by other means. It took me far too long so
this may be better. However, it's worth being aware of what the
templates offer at

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/xodtemplate.html

. Some things, even at an early stage, are obviously better  eg

 - rescheduling a check (instead of force an immediate check) is a means
of having Nagios run a check when you want it to run.

This is handy for RRD updates that expect data to arrive at the DS
update interval (otherwise the numbers look funny because the DS is
updated with interpolated values).

 - the availability CGI looks better (to me)
 
 - the extinfo CGI looks better (to me). Having the summary availability
info was not actually useful (more of a liability if you are reporting
across some interval, because you would have to reset the status.log to
reset the stats)

. If it's not obvious, you can change the Alias and ScriptAlias
directives in Apache to reduce the impact on Netsaint bookmarks (most of
my colleagues are still browsing http://some_host/netsaint/ after
adding

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/netsaint/ "/usr/local/nagios/sbin/" 
 
    Alias /netsaint/ "/usr/local/nagios/share/" ).

To sum up, I made the change in about a day for a small site with ~200
hosts and ~325 checks.


> Kind regards,
> Tom
> 

Enjoy.

Yours sincerely.
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.


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