Is there a testing or debugging mode for nagios?

[Nathan Oyler]

> Hello,
>
[Nathan Oyler] 

Hey Ralph,
 
> this morning I received the contempt of my fellow admins because
> nagios swamped their mailboxes
> over night.
> Well, it wasn't of course nagios' fault but mine
> because I defined a template service wherein I referenced a
> conact_groups that comprised all of us.
> When later adding new services I simply forgot to override this
> attribute with a contact group that contained only my mail
> account (until I've come to terms with configuring).
> 
[Nathan Oyler] 

Ahh, I remember doing things similar to that. Good times.

I ended up making a second nagios instance where I test out new ideas
before I put them into production. It was an exact replica of the
production system (updated every time I wanted to do something), but
with my as a contact for everything, so only I'd get hit with my
mistakes. It seemed pretty silly testing some very simple adds of
services first, but I never had an issue like that happen again.

I use a tool called Ntray which can be found on nagiosexchange.org which
shows me a constantly updated little icon of my Nagios instance. That
way I can watch what is going on before everyone is hit with tons of
messages. I used to catch my mistakes before anyone noticed, now I catch
problems before anyone else, and the fast response doesn't hurt either.

Finally, writing tools to add, and remove hosts was just awesome. Now I
don't miss adding something because I don't have to think about it. I
didn't know anything about perl, but for parsing Nagios config files,
it's not bad to learn. I'd suggest it for anyone with a little time on
their hands.

I haven't had any problems like that in a quite awhile.

It's not High Level debugging utilities, but I thought it might help you
out. I was frustrated at first, but Nagios makes my job so much easier
now.

-Nathan




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