Some questions before switching to nagios

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Sun, 2003-07-20 at 05:01, Brian Rectanus wrote:
> Hello,
>   I am currently monitoring our systems here with mon.  As we are
> expanding our systems and services, mon is getting too complex to
> maintain.  Nagios looks like a nice alternative, but at first glance, I
> see a limitation in what can be returned from a plugin.  It seems that
> only a single line of output is read from the plugin.  This seems very
> limiting to me.  Currently, with mon, I get both a summary (one line)
> and details (as many lines as you want, in any format).  For example,
> for a disk freespace problem, I would get a summary of say 'hostname
> disk freespace low' and a detail listing the filesystems with problems.

You already get all this data in the summary line of check_disk.

> Another example would be a load problem: sumarry: 'hostname has high
> load', and the detail would list the load and the top 10 processes at
> the time of measurment with their cooresponding CPU/mem usage.

Check_load does not return this info. Check_cpu is not a core plugin,
and also does not provide this info. But either could provide several
processes in the return string if they chose to, on one line of course.

It would be a simpe matter to place a filter before the mail client to
reformat some special token as a "\n"

> This is very useful as our pagers would get the simple summary and you could
> check your email or the mon web page for the details.
> 
> I did a quick search in the FAQ and archives, but did not turn up
> anything overly intersting on this subject.  For me this is a required
> feature and I cannot imagine why such a limitation would be imposed, so
> my first thought is that I must be overlooking something.
> 
> So, my questions are: Is this truly a limitation with nagios?

Is it part of the current design? Yes. Is it a limitation? Depends on
your perspective, I guess, but I'll go out on a limb and agree with you,
albeit I think it is smaller than you suggest.

> If it is, is there a way to work around this?

None that I know of.

> If need be, is there intrest in this feature being added to
> nagios (by me) and would a patch be accepted?

To patch the system, nagios would need to accept more data. IIRC, in the
2.0 version currently in devlopment, the way nagios accepts messages
from plugins has been changed so much larger data segmants can be
managed. So the sort of extension you suggest maybe could be done.

Of course, the plugins themselves would also need to produce this
extended data. As a plugin maintainer, I would support adding this as a
standard option to the plugins. I also feel that it should be an option
because some peaple may be heavily optimizing their performance, and may
not want the bandwidth penalty (imagine an install that has a modom as a
failover interface, for instance - bandwidth might matter)

--
Karl



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