Distributed setup - host checking

[Thomas Guyot-Sionnest]

On 09/03/07 08:17 AM, Marco Supino wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> I would like to know how people handle host checking in a distributed
> environment.

The Nagios documentation suggest leaving active host checks on the
central server as you normally can't have freshness checking on them. I
believe that's just a matter of personal preference and you can have
them distributed just like the rest.

> Assuming the “Central” server is not able to access the computers in the
> remote sites, I am using passive checks through NSCA to get the active
> results done by the “Agent” nagios.

That's another idea. You can have the "check_host_alive" command run
nrpe with args, though it's considered a big security risk. It shouldn't
be a problem though is there's no users on the lan and it is properly
secured.

Note that the additional latency of running nrpe could impact
performances if there's a lot of hosts.

> How do you define the hosts of the computers in the central server? Do
> you use localhost as the host IP? Do you use freshness checking of hosts
> in the central server?

IMHO the IP is fine.

> I had an idea to use scheduled checking of the host on the “Agent” , and
> send passive host results to the central nagios, if freshness checking
> discovers the results are not fresh, It runs a script that put “Info:
> host info is stale”, and will exit with the same error code the host is
> currently in (from the a macro value),

That's a good idea too. It will reduce a lot the impact of host checks
on performances.

> I think my way of handling this is wrong, as scheduled host checking
> must be done on the agent, which is bad for performance.

Another solution is to use Nagios 3 which has a completely different
logic for host checks. You shouldn't have performance impact anymore
with a properly set-up Nagios 3. You must keep in mind that's it'S alpha
software and can (and likely will) have bugs.

Thomas

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