[Nagiosplug-devel] Writing a new universal cross-platform plugin?

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 18:03, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> I'm quite sure that this would benefit users. The reason of making a general 
> plugin instead of mrtg, nsclient and all sorts of stuff is to simplify it 
> all. SNMP is generally more tricky to set up than an agent on most systems

I found net-snmp to be very easy to implement.

> as you'll need to know SNMP, obviously. Most people don't. 

When I first started plying with this, I did not know snmp either.

Without trying to sound rude, I humbly suggest it might be worth
people's time to learn.

I'll suggest a few reasons:

1) SNMP is available for switches, printers, temperature monitors, and a
host of other devices that you are not likely to be able to run your
universal plugin on.

2) SNMP can be very lightweight using the v1 protocol in secure
environments, or well secured using v3 in less secure situations

3) SNMP already monitors more than your plugin is likeky to address -
from number of open TCP connections to running prosesses to load to swap
sapce to version numbers of installed software, and more. 

4) It should be easier to get access NAT blocks, VPNs, firewalls, etc
with SNMP where corporate policy may already exist and there are
external security audits that can be used to justify security policy.

5) SNMP already exists and works, as does the plugin to query it.
 
I don't want to say you should not have at it, but do not discount SNMP.
It is well worth the learning curve, it is quite reliable once
implemented, and there is virtue to the ide that the best programmers
are the ones that write the fewest lines of code.

my $0.02.

--
Karl

> The auto-discovery 
> part is almost finished already using multicast 'pings' (talking to the 
> agents). So - give us a week or ten, I beleive this project will gain 
> Nagios's quality a lot :)
> 
> roy
> 
> On Tuesday 29 July 2003 22:49, you wrote:
> > I'm not sure what kind of benefit you would gain from writing the client
> > side portion of this since SNMP agents exist for nearly all platforms
> > you could conceive.  The non-trivial part is the auto-discovery.  HP
> > OpenView does this via pings and SNMP queries, but you run into the
> > problem where machines with multiple interfaces end up as multiple
> > instances within your configuration.  And that can be very messy.
> >
> > I think many people would be interested if some sort of simple
> > auto-discovery tool was available for Nagios in order to pre-populate
> > configurations.
> >
> > --Andy
> >
> > Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> > > hi all
> > >
> > > This friend of mine came up with a rather neat idea:
> > >
> > > Write a new universal cross-platform plugin in perl (run as service in
> > > windows). Configure the service to expose the services to be monitored
> > > (disk space on device c: or /dev/sda, cpu etc), and have an auto-dicover
> > > script dicover all local hosts/services, creating nagios configs for it.
> > >
> > > Perhaps this should be done directly in a database? will nagios 2 support
> > > database-based configs?
> > >
> > > roy
> > >
> > >
> > >
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> 
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