What's That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog]

All | LAMP | Music | Java | Ruby | What's That Noise? | The Agilist | Commute | Ball
Main | Next day (Aug 17, 2004) »

20040816 Monday August 16, 2004

Scaling Nagios Maintaining a healthy state in a complex system of hosts and services requires fastidious proactive management. Though I try my best to stay focused on software, operations has been the biggest pain point at work lately and my focus has, at least in recent months, had to shift to where the pain is.

Besides the runtime scaling characteristics, I'm very concerned with the scalability of human maintenance. When hosts and services are coming into and going out of service on a regular basis, keeping a monitoring framework upto date with the current state of the inventory can be quite onerous. While Nagios provides a reasonable facility for keeping track of resource availability, it provides no help with keeping the inventory current. After poking around the perldoc for Nagios::Object, it looks like some thought gone into programmatic generation of Nagios configuration stanzas but it seems kinda laughable that Nagios itself can't be programmatically updated; it has to read config files to know what hosts and services to monitor. Ya know what they say: there are high maintenance girlfriends and low maintenance girlfriends and then there are the worst kind... the high maintenance ones who think they are low maintenance. Nagios is a high maintenance girlfriend. Since I don't have it I sure hope someone finds the time on their hands to make the Nagios configuration data-driven; I'd like to have a RDBMS housed inventory system tied into my monitoring framework.

Oh, wait. I worked on such a beast already in an endeavor that begat Hyperic.

( Aug 16 2004, 10:09:25 PM PDT ) Permalink