[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Michael Sprague]

On 08/27/2010 11:32 PM, Ian Stokes-Rees wrote:
>
> On 8/27/10 7:28 PM, Adam Moskowitz wrote:
>    
>> 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.
>>      
> I have to support the position that creating Nagios configs is not as
> simple as it should/could be.  TTBOMK it hasn't changed since 2002 when
> I first encountered it, and the tools to work with configs don't exist
> (or at least aren't well known).
>
> I consider it remarkable that Nagios hasn't improved on some of these
> components.  I made some contributions 8 years ago when I got into it
> heavily, but given how widely used it is, why doesn't the community work
> to improve it, rather than start from scratch with new tools which
> really are addressing the interface issues, rather than the underlying
> functionality (which, IMHO, is very good).
>
> All that said, to whoever the original poster was, I'd knuckle down and
> learn the Nagios config language and/or write some bash/perl/python
> scripts to manage your config files.
>
>    

I would have to agree.  The promise of nagios v4, with a db backend and 
a php frontend, has been around for years AFAIK and it would be great to 
have that.  But in the meantime, nagios v3 does what it says and can 
save a lot of headaches.  Sure the config is a pain in the @$$ but if 
you're only doing remote monitoring of a few servers it shouldn't be too 
hard to set up.  Especially in you don't need to monitor items on the 
server with SNMP or nscd.  I would suggest that spending the time to 
config nagios to suit your needs would be a lot less than rolling your 
own in this case.

The nagios config is partly a pain b/ it's so flexible.  If you find a 
system that suits you, and possibly semi-automate it with some scripts, 
it should be easy to maintain and pretty darn reliable.

Just my $0.02,
M

-- 
Michael F. Sprague
mfs at komerex.com