[Nagiosplug-devel] RFC: Nagios 3 and Embedded Perl Plugins

[Andreas Ericsson]

Stéphane Urbanovski wrote:
> Florian Gleixner a écrit :
>> True, leaks and crashes could make nagios more unstable. dl-plugins
>> should be used with care. "Worker threads" could isolate some of the risk.
>>
>> The performance gain is simply the time a C plugin needs to create a
>> process. You could say, that this is not very much time, but some nagios
>> setups make thousands of checks per minute.
> 
> [...]
>  
>> I think some default plugins like ping or tcp-check could be made as dl
>> module, the more complicated or the plugins that are usually executed at
>> the monitored nodes should be "normal" plugins.
> 
> Hello
> 
> Just an idea
> 
> - extending nrpe to be able to support builtin commonly used checks (ping, load, mem, disk, etc ...)

Supporting ICMP in a loadable module (or indeed in a daemon of any kind) 
has its problems as was stated in another mail in this thread.

Supporting system load, memory usage and disk usage is, again, a 
different kind of worms. There's no standardized interface usable to 
obtain these metrics that reliably work on the set of systems supported 
by the current plugin-distribution. As such, it would be maintenance 
nightmare to try to keep it working on all those systems. For reference, 
download the GNU coreutils package and count the #ifdef lines. Not pretty.

> and support permanent connection to Nagios (over Unix or TCP sockect)

This would require a lot of hacking in Nagios to solve.


> - make Nagios support directly this new "super" nrpe as dl module
> 
> Security and memory management problems should be easier to fix,
> or at least have a lower impact if limited to nrpe.
> 

But you just said to load this newfangled dream-version of nrpe as a 
module? That sort of microsoft'ish thinking leads to "integrated" and 
very unstable code I'm afraid.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
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