Matt Simmons wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm attending the 2010 Professional IT Community Conference > (http://www.picconf.org) being held in New Brunswick, NJ, and I'm > giving a talk about staying sane while working with the Nagios > configuration. > > The talk will be 45 minutes long, and will primarily be an outshoot > from this article that I wrote on my blog: > http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2009/07/nagios-config/ > > I could talk about that and some other things that I've been figuring > out, but I was wondering if anyone had any tricks or tips for dealing > with the Nagios config? Is there anything special that you do to keep > things straight? > > I'm going to be putting my slides and any additional material online > following the conference, so hopefully someone else can get some use > from it. > > By the way, if anyone on this list is in the north east of the US, you > should come visit the conference. Without training, it's only $275 for > 2 days. With a full day and a half of training, it's still only $400 > for the whole shebang. Anyway, this isn't a sales email. > > I'm looking forward to any tips you would want to share. Thanks in advance! > > --Matt >
I manage the Nagios installation for 3 different domains at work, each domain with several hundred servers and clients. I quickly reached the "There's got to be a better way!" point when trying to maintain configuration files that were getting pretty big. I was using all the tricks listed in the Nagios docs, but it was still pretty crazy. The approach I took was to write a configuration generator program that uses a meta-config file to generate the hosts.cfg, hostgroups.cfg and services.cfg config files. The meta-config file allows one to set up cascading configuration variables, and then has one line per monitored host, that includes things like host groups, parents, etc, and then a list of services to monitor. I also created the idea of "meta-services" that allow the program to generate configuration data for any number of related services with a single service name in the meta-config file. For instance, including the service "weball" will cause the configuration generator to create service entries for every plumbed interface on the web server, checks for every virtual server (http and https), and checks for every SSL cert that it finds. In one domain, a 400 line meta-config file generates a 20,000 line services.cfg file. Rather than updating individual config files, I just update the meta-config file and then regenerate all of the *.cfg files. I've been using this for several years with very good results. -- David Wallis Information Technology Advanced Photon Source Argonne National Laboratory ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null
