[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Joe McDonagh]

On 08/27/2010 03:55 PM, Alex Aminoff wrote:
> Hi folks. I need a better monitoring system. I currently use something I 
> wrote 10 years ago using parts of Spong and other bits.
> 
> I looked at Nagios, which seems to be the most commonly mentioned thing 
> today. The configuration files are not easily hand-editable. This would 
> be OK if there were decent tools to spit them out, but a day of hacking 
> did not find anything simple to install and use.
> 
> What I need is something so simple I could write it myself from scratch 
> in a couple days if I had a couple days. I don't want SNMP or any sort 
> of agent on the client to be monitored (in my case I'm monitoring my 
> customers' machines) - I just want remote network checks: does it ping, 
> is port 80 responding, that sort of thing. I would like the 
> configuration file to be as simple as possible: definitely no XML, and 
> preferably few parentheses. In fact, how about if my config file is DNS? 
> Start with pinging everything in my domain, if there is an MX record 
> pointing to it check SNMP, if "www" points to it check port 80. For 
> exceptions to that general case, have a config file.
> 
> I like BigBrother's config file, but BB's implementation is a snarl of 
> shell script that does not do a good job of producing transparent error 
> messages when things are not exactly right. At least for the 
> non-commercial version, which does not appear to be maintained. And BB 
> has agents on the clients too.
> 
> Or perhaps I should just run nmap on my network every 10 minutes and 
> alert me if there is a diff from the previous results. Prone to false 
> positives I would think.
> 
>   - Alex
> 
> 
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/me furiously guards my nagios boxes

I haven't touched a config file on them in months thanks to puppet, but
I always thought the files were easy to deal with anyways. I have heard
of perl tools that auto discover and write your configs out.

-- 
Joe McDonagh
AIM: YoosingYoonickz
IRC: joe-mac on freenode
L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire