Keeping the Nagios Configuration Sane

[David Wallis]

Matt Simmons wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm attending the 2010 Professional IT Community Conference
> (http://www.picconf.org) being held in New Brunswick, NJ, and I'm
> giving a talk about staying sane while working with the Nagios
> configuration.
>
> The talk will be 45 minutes long, and will primarily be an outshoot
> from this article that I wrote on my blog:
> http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2009/07/nagios-config/
>
> I could talk about that and some other things that I've been figuring
> out, but I was wondering if anyone had any tricks or tips for dealing
> with the Nagios config? Is there anything special that you do to keep
> things straight?
>
> I'm going to be putting my slides and any additional material online
> following the conference, so hopefully someone else can get some use
> from it.
>
> By the way, if anyone on this list is in the north east of the US, you
> should come visit the conference. Without training, it's only $275 for
> 2 days. With a full day and a half of training, it's still only $400
> for the whole shebang. Anyway, this isn't a sales email.
>
> I'm looking forward to any tips you would want to share. Thanks in advance!
>
> --Matt
>   

I manage the Nagios installation for 3 different domains at work, each 
domain with several hundred servers and clients. I quickly reached the 
"There's got to be a better way!" point when trying to maintain 
configuration files that were getting pretty big. I was using all the 
tricks listed in the Nagios docs, but it was still pretty crazy.

The approach I took was to write a configuration generator program that 
uses a meta-config file to generate the hosts.cfg, hostgroups.cfg and 
services.cfg config files. The meta-config file allows one to set up 
cascading configuration variables, and then has one line per monitored 
host, that includes things like host groups, parents, etc, and then a 
list of services to monitor.

I also created the idea of "meta-services" that allow the program to 
generate configuration data for any number of related services with a 
single service name in the meta-config file. For instance, including the 
service "weball" will cause the configuration generator to create 
service entries for every plumbed interface on the web server, checks 
for every virtual server (http and https), and checks for every SSL cert 
that it finds. In one domain, a 400 line meta-config file generates a 
20,000 line services.cfg file.

Rather than updating individual config files, I just update the 
meta-config file and then regenerate all of the *.cfg files. I've been 
using this for several years with very good results.

-- 
David Wallis
Information Technology
Advanced Photon Source
Argonne National Laboratory


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