Switching to passive checks instead of active ones?

[Live Great]

Hello Ivan,

I believe the host check can only be done via a Nagios agent installed in the remote host or via check_by_ssh.
You said you want to replace check_by_ssh, why are you doing so?
Most customer don't want a specific monitoring agent installed in their server (a remote host in Nagios' slang).

Thanks
Sam.


----- Original Message ----
From: Ivan Fetch <ifetch at du.edu>
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Sent: Friday, October 5, 2007 1:40:45 PM
Subject: [Nagios-users] Switching to passive checks instead of active ones?

Hello,


    I'm wondering whether anyone has used send_nsca as a primary 
"transport" for service checks, and has any experience and 
recommendations?

    We're looking at using send_nsca to submit passive service checks in 
place of check_by_ssh or NRPE for active checks and would like some 
feedback on the sanity for doing this.




    The plan is to

    1. Run a script from cron, which iterates through a list of 
checks (plugins to run, with parameters), and runs each check.  There 
would need to be a timeout mechanism, to reap checks which hang - does 
anyone have something they use for this with send_nsca (not all plugins 
have builtin timeouts)?

    2. Each plugin is run via a wrapper script (nsca_wrapper) which runs 
the plugin and passes the results to send_nsca.  IF send_nsca returns an 
error, the wrapper script logs to the local syslog.  I'm starting with a 
wrapper script from here: 
http://www.nagiosexchange.org/Check_Plugins.21.0.html?&tx_netnagext_pi1%5Bp_view%5D=980

    3. Nagios' freshness checking will alert us if Nagios stops hearing 
from any of these passive checks.


    Some of the motivations for switching to this method for running checks 
are:

    * System logs are not cluttered with frequent SSH logins by Nagios

    * A new system service (NRPE) is not added to systems, some of which 
are particularly tightened and narrow in purpose

    * Thresholds for checks (disk space percentages, mail queue volume) are 
moved to the client, not defined in Nagios checks - some
admins like the ability to adjust these locally


    I'm looking for folks doing something like this, or reasons why this 
might be a particularly bad idea.  Perhaps Nagios triggering checks 
has so much sanity built in, that moving checks to the 
push-to-Nagios model is a bad idea?



Thanks all,

Ivan Fetch.


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