Nagios Plugin: Request for Comments

[divagater]

I suspect a lot of users like myself are running Nagios for monitoring/alerting and Cacti for trending. Since I spend most of my time in Cacti and its interface is far superior to Nagios, I decided to add a Nagios plugin to Cacti using cigamit's excellent plugin architecture.

Using the slightly modified MySQL 4.1.x NEB module for nagios 2.0 by Matthew Kent, Nagios "events" are written to some custom tables that are added to the Cacti DB.

This plugin is in very early development but I wanted to solicit some input for features or even if its a good idea. I attached a few screen shots to give an idea of what this plugin does so far.

~Billy

[langyufeng]

very good!
can you offer it?

[stevew]

This looks excellent. I too am running Nagios and Cacti.

FWIW I understand it that the future of Nagios will be a monitoring engine that is separate from the web interface... i.e. there will be several spin off projects to create interfaces in php,perl,ruby,asp... whatever. This is planned for version 3
http://www.nagios.org/development/upcoming.php

Making such an addon for Cacti is a really good idea. I probably wouldn't switch totally unless I could abandon the Nagios UI - i.e. maps, external commands, comments and scheduling.

[Hannibal]

Hello

I'm interested byy this plugin. Where to get it ?

Yhanks

[rebel]

Looks great. Please share it.

[aleto]

yeah.. im looking for this already for a LONG while.. so please share if you can

[ahinric]

this integration is exactly what we are looking for!

[divagater]

I am glad to see some positive response to this plugin. It is my plan to eventually make this plugin a complete and alternative interface to Nagios.

I will definitely be sharing it and making it available for download in the very near future. This week I will be finishing up a few features that should be available in the first release as well as getting some initial documentation complete.

Look for the first release some time next week and keep the comments coming if you have any ideas about what you would like to see as a feature.

Cheers,
Billy

[BrettS]

This is exactly where both projects should be heading. Is it also tied into threasholds as suggested by your screenshots?

Any help in testing evaluating Id be MORE than happy to help.
Your plugin adds signifigantly to both projects as cacti lacks in good alerting and service checks and Nagios definately lacks in the performance trending department.

Given a modicum of stability Ill put this into a reasonable production environment of about 200 hosts.

thanks again for a great start on a very promising plugin.

Brett Stevens

[zbose]

Let me chime in as another corporate "customer" of cacti running Nagios as well. I would love to be able to avoid logging into the nagios interface completely! Nagios map, host summary and downtime scheduler would be top my wishlist.

BTW, anyone know of any nagios configuration programs?

[cigamit]

[snip] I decided to add a Nagios plugin to Cacti using cigamit's excellent plugin architecture.

Glad my contribution could be of some help. Let me know if you happen to find any other place you think a hook might be helpful, and I will add it to the plugin architecture.

Maybe eventually the developers will take a gander at it and decide that it could be of some use (and put it in the core) so then your plugin could work out-of-the-box.

Looking good so far, keep it up!

[BrettS]

A question. Is the thold plugin integrated? That would probably be the most useful feature in my mind. So far Ive been playing around with thold and Id love to integrate it strait into nagios . There would be a number of ways to do this, passive checks accepting a message dropped from the thold module. This is what I was trying using the log message functionality but I couldnt get consistant results. I will try again later.

Apart from that, what you show on your screenscrapes is just about perfect. The"Corporate User" probably, mostly just uses those functions.

Perhaps some of the grouping functions such as servicegroups and host groups could be added. However as IMHO I think the menubar is cluttered on the orriginal nagios wui can I suggest that you stick to what you have but add some sort of grouping checkbox / sorting options to provide filtering of hosts and services. In a large implimentation this could be a god send.

Keep up the excellent work and please let us know when you plan to release this

[divagater]

Hey Brett. Your thinking was right on track with the way I feel this plugin should go. I also feel that the Nagios menu bar is clutered and as a long time user of Nagios I have an idea about which features of the UI are useful and which are not.

Development of the plugin is moving along nicely. I am currently working on command execution. When that is done I think I will have a usable Nagios UI alternative.

The very next step will be to integrate the thold plugin. I was actualy just discussing how best to do it right before I read your post.

Thanks for the comments and stay tuned.

~Billy

[rony]

Maybe eventually the developers will take a gander at it and decide that it could be of some use (and put it in the core) so then your plugin could work out-of-the-box.

That's not a maybe..

0.9.0 will include a plugin archecture. I have yet to start it and am going to be conversing with you, cigamit, about it.

I don't know at this time if old plugins will work with the new plugin arch. I will not promise that, nor do I have any detail, as I have only started my work on this path.

[cigamit]

Maybe eventually the developers will take a gander at it and decide that it could be of some use (and put it in the core) so then your plugin could work out-of-the-box.

That's not a maybe..

0.9.0 will include a plugin archecture. I have yet to start it and am going to be conversing with you, cigamit, about it.

I don't know at this time if old plugins will work with the new plugin arch. I will not promise that, nor do I have any detail, as I have only started my work on this path.

Great!!! I will glady help out in any way I can, just let me know what you need done.

The current architecture I have ported is GPLed and proven over the last couple of years in the Squirrelmail project (I'm a Developer and a Plugin Team Leader over there) Its simple yet extremely effective in what it can do, and ofcourse can be modified to take it even further if you wish. I would definitely like to see what you have in mind, so just drop me an email when you get the chance (maybe IRC?) and maybe we can start hashing something out.