Generation of distributed nagios configuration w/cfengine

[Luke A. Kanies]

Hi all,

I've been working on this project for a while, and I think I've finally reached 
what I would call a beta.

I've now got a collection of scripts (all written in Ruby) which generate the 
necessary configurations for running an appropriate nagios configuration on 
each node (using nsca to push updates to the central server) plus an aggregated 
configuration for the central node.  This system is completely 
self-maintaining, built off the information I store in my cfengine 
configurations.  Using cfengine, it automatically restarts the nagios processes 
when configurations change, and it automatically builds and redistributes the 
configurations as necessary.

As with all betas, the documentation is not yet up to snuff, but you can find 
the (current) main page at:

http://madstop.com/naginator

There you'll also find a tarball of the latest snapshot (as of today) plus a 
link to the Subversion code.  Install instructions are available at 
http://madstop.com/svn/naginator/INSTALL, along with mucho detail about the 
whys and wherefores.

As with all solutions, this one works for the author (me), but others might 
find it useful, too.  I do need to point out, though:  This is not necessarily 
terribly easy to set up, as its setup is meant to be entirely automated with a 
tool like cfengine.  The focus of its development is on its ability to maintain 
itself over time; as I add services to my hosts (using cfengine), I want to 
automatically start monitoring them, and as I add things like disks, I want 
them to automatically start being monitored.

Yes, I have achieved a completely self-maintaining monitoring system with 
Nagios.  It still has some quirks, but hopefully if a few more people use it, 
we can iron them out and get something good.

I will gladly take suggestions and recommendations.  I'm especially interested 
in people who might be integrating this with their own larger management 
system, as it will force me to abstract out the cfengine parts.

On the other hand, if anyone is interested in how this integrates with the rest 
of my automation, please email me off-list.

This package also includes a full, LALR parser for nagios configuration files. 
It's written in ruby, but it makes parsing files trivial, and it includes full 
object definitions for all currently known Nagios objects.

I also have a generated LDAP schema for nagios objects, although I'm not 
currently using it.  Please let me know if you're interested.

Thanks,
Luke

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Luke Kanies | http://abstractive.org | http://reductiveconsulting.com