How to monitor transient services?

[Janet Post]

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.)

Thanks,

Janet Post


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