Using nagios for reporting on non-machine data such as employees?

[Aaron Devey]

Kelly,
I admire your determination to use nagios in many versatile ways. 
Unfortunately, nagios is probably not the best fit in this case.  This 
is especially true if you really intend to use passive checks instead of 
leveraging nagios' powerful scheduling or notification features.  Plus, 
adding a new employee could be a potential nightmare if many systems are 
involved. The effort spent in getting nagios services set up and 
reto-fitted the way you need would be much better spent on a more 
conventional solution. Your situation is fairly unique, so I am unable 
to think of any ready-to-go solutions.  In the long run it's probably 
easiest to periodically upload all this data to a database and put some 
php scripts together so you can view reports on that data over a web 
interface.
-Aaron Devey

Kelly Jones wrote:

>We have various systems that keep track of employee data: when an
>employee was last paid, hours of sick/vacation leave accrued,
>employee's laptop's last IP address (from DHCP server), last time
>employee's laptop was backed up (from backup server), whether employee
>is on-lave/traveling, whether the employee has been receiving email
>(vs employee's mailbox being full, account not setup properly, etc),
>etc.
>
>I realized we could use nagios' "passive service checks" to have the
>various systems upload employee data to our nagios server, but was
>wondering if this was fitting a round peg into a square hole.
>
>Is nagios a good tool for monitoring things that aren't machines? If
>not, what would be a good tool?
>
>One concern: nagios tends to treat data as almost "binary"-- either
>something is good (green) or bad (red) [yes, yellow + "unknown" also
>exist, but it's still almost binary]. In some cases, we're just
>looking to create an "employee status report" page that has text data
>on the employee (pushed from various servers), without necessarily
>categorizing the data as "good" or "bad".
>
>  
>


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