Dynamically generated service checks

[David Rosenstrauch]

Matthew Jurgens wrote:
> I do a similar thing where I dynamically change the service check 
> definitions configured into Nagios. You've almost got to this solution 
> but say "and couldn't just ". Not sure why you say that but I'll briefly 
> cover what I did. You will need some programming/scripting.
> 
> First up in the nagios.cfg file configure either a specific 
> configuration file or directory where you will define your dynamic 
> service checks
> eg cfg_dir=/etc/nagios/dynamic_services or
> cfg_file=/etc/nagios/dynamic_services.cfg
> 
> Using a file/directory will be dependent on exactly how you need to 
> generate your checks.
> 
> Then at the point where you know what the service checks will be 
> generate the appropriate nagios config file based on what is in the 
> database into either your single config file or into one file each in 
> the dynamic directory.
> 
> You will then need to reload the nagios config and make sure it syntaxes 
> ok.
> 
> We do this quite sucessfully. When customers add/delete servers we just 
> regenerate the config to match and reload Nagios.


Thanks much for the response Matthew.  Very helpful!

I understand what you're suggesting here.  Sounds like a couple of 
potential issues with it though.  By doing this via regenerating a 
config file, this means that:

1) We would need to manually kick off a "config file regenerate" process 
each time a user adds/changes a tag/file in our system.  It would be 
much better if there were some way to have nagios automatically pick up 
the change without any manual intervention.  (Though I suppose we could 
work around this by using a cron job that runs periodically, checks for 
updates, and then regenerates the config if needed.)

2) If I understand correctly, Nagios loads its config files at startup 
time and does not re-read them after that.  So if I'm regenerating a 
config file, then that means I'd need to restart the Nagios service 
afterwards, which is a bit of an onerous imposition.  And although 
again, I could in theory do this in a cron job, I'm not sure I'm 
comfortable with that.  There's the potential for the Nagios service to 
not start up again successfully, and I don't like taking the risk that 
this dynamic update procedure could potentially bring down the entire 
Nagios system.


Hmmmm .... there's got to be *some* other way to accomplish this, no?

Thanks,

DR

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