[Wolves] Icinga (Nagios)

[Peter Cannon]

On 05/15/2010 12:27 AM, chris procter wrote:

> If you really want to try the rhel6 beta you can get it from http://www.redhat.com/rhel/beta/ and follow the links, but Centos is simply RHEL without the trademarks so unless you want a support plan your not going to gain anything.

To be honest it's a bit of a 'full circle journey' some older members 
may remember I was an RH user when I joined back in 1847. I knew I could 
get the Beta but it was the 30 day time out that put me off. As we all 
know (Or should know) CentOS is RHEL with all the logo's stripped out.

> We use nagios partially because I inherited it and partisally because its easy to customise with a bit of shell scripting to monitor anything you can think of.

Yeah this is why I keep going back to it (Icinga is Nagios with all the 
logo's stripped out)

> There are a number of ways of doing remote monitoring with nagios, the simplest is using ssh, gtheres a pluging called check_by_ssh (or something) that runs on the master a logs into the remote machine via ssh, runs the check plugin and returns the results to the master. You obviously need to be able to get an ssh connection to the remote host and login using certificates rather then passwords, but the master initiates the connection, the remote host just listens.

OK in my usual 'lazy git Pete' manner I wanted, for example, to be able 
to initially say to someone "Download this from 
www.honest-turpin-support.com/nrpe.zip(whatever) install that".

Write the configuration template in Nagios at my end, start getting info 
from the remote machine. Sort of a very very low level support type 
thing "OMG Chris_P's server has just fell over" Ring ring, ring, ring, 
"Hello Chris? Your Servers fell over mate" "Ooh has it? Oh yeah I cant 
get on xxx drive I love the way you know before we do Pete" Kissy kissy 
hug hug.

I'm not talking a simple ping service here it would be nice to be able 
to say "Chris_P your FFF drive is getting full" or some of the other 
info I know you can get.

As for fixing the fallen server that's another matter, the point being 
(And I know this is not going to happen) Ideally I wanted to be able to 
have a daemon or service running on the remote machine stick the IP in 
Nagios, management machine without and ssh or firewall crap to deal with.

> Not sure any of that helps any,

Yes it does. and in crayon drawn terms I can understand too :-)