[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Adam Moskowitz]

Alex Aminoff wrote:
> Nagios . . . The configuration files are not easily hand-editable.

Really? Except for the "define foo {" and matching "}", it's straight-
forward key-value. Yes, you can make them more complicated, but I was
able to do quite a bit with plain key-value.

> This would be OK if there were decent tools to spit them out

I wrote my own "tools" -- really, just a small set of shell scripts --
because I needed a little bit of customization, but the production of
the config files themselves was trivial. If you want, contact me off-
list and I'll make them available.

> What I need is something so simple I could write it myself from scratch 
> in a couple days if I had a couple days.

Are you sure about that? You may not care about many of the features
Nagios provides, but for simple stuff like making sure all your tests
don't fire at exactly the same time, like not sending alerts for
everything up the stack when it's one simple thing at the bottom that's
broken, and like not paging you to death when a service is flapping or
when you've said "ACK" to an alert and are still working on it the next
time the test fires -- why reinvent all those wheels?

> how about if my config file is DNS? 

My scripts didn't have access to the DNS config files so I did the next
best thing: I used dig. Sure, I also had a few small config files of my
own (mainly for things like email addresses and who was sent which
alerts), but those files were all plain-ASCII key-value stuff.

I guess I really don't understand how or why you think Nagios configs
have to be complex. If you're going to spend time writing anything, I
strongly suggest you write a few simple scripts to create Nagios files;
it really is pretty easy.

Adam