How to monitor transient services?

[Steven Lynch]

On 27/07/2006, at 12:11 AM, Janet Post wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We are monitoring several different types of very fluid services and I
> am having a design problem -- how do I set these up neatly in nagios.
>
> The first of these checks is a script that runs agains a reporting
> database.  This script runs every five minutes to make sure that  
> all of
> the reports ran, or are running correctly.  There are, at the moment,
> around 50 reports, but the number and frequency of the reports changes
> on a nearly daily basis.  Granted, some reports are fairly stable: the
> one that tells our VP's how much money we made last night is one that
> rarely changes.  But there are a number of one-off reports that are
> created and deleted on an almost daily basis.  I do NOT want to  
> maintain
> a check in nagios for each and every report -- that's an  
> administrative
> nightmare.  I want to just run this script that checks them all at the
> same time - no fuss no muss.  BUT!  And here is the problem:  How do I
> return the results to nagios?  It is conceivable that more than one
> report will fail at a time, and I will want notifications sent for all
> failures.  I don't mind clumping them into one email -- but can NRPE
> handle more than one line of return values?
>
> The script in question is run remotely from my main nagios server.  I
> can invoke it either using nrpe, or via cron -- whichever way I see  
> fit.
>
> Any ideas on how I can solve this dilemma?  How can I return multiple
> errors for a single check?  (I have an oracle tablespace check that
> suffers the same problem -- too many transient tablespaces to be
> monitored and I don't want to have a check for each TS because they  
> are
> too temporary.)

Hi Janet,

It is true that only one line is supported. However, since the output  
is going to be rendered by a browser you can embed HTML in that one  
line.
So, for example, you can put a <PRE> at the start and use <BR> to  
begin each new line. I have used this technique quite successfully.

The only small drawback is, if you are sending out page messages you  
will need a small intermediate script to strip out the HTML again  
before sending the text to the paging process.

Cheers

Steven
--
Steven Lynch  [Chief Technical Officer]
mailto: steven.lynch at network-box.com.au
Network Box Australia Pty Ltd           Phone: +61-3-88410000
Suite 9 / 1020 Doncaster Road,          Fax:   +61-3-88410088
Doncaster East, Vic, Australia, 3109    Web:   www.network-box.com.au



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