Nagios Support Forum

All,

We have a customer that wants to retire their large NMS system due to cost and complexity. Nagios is on the short list, but my customer's NMS includes a fairly sophisticated workflow component. Whenever they detect something wrong, they send the alert to this workflow engine and it executes a series of tasks with branches and sequels depending on the output of the last task(s).

Nagios Reactor looks like it did this, but it is not supported anymore according to the docs. Is anyone in this forum doing this? Would anyone like to do this? I have ideas on how I would do this, but want to get feedback from this group.

Does the old NMS have a way in which those workflows/tasks could be executed programatically?

If so, for each host/service in Nagios, you could configure an event handler to kick-off the associated task in the "NMS workflow bot" for problem states:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... dlers.html
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

The event handler would basically just be a script that says "start WorkflowX".

Thanks @mcapra!

@cms1cd, are you using Core or XI? Ultimately, I'm not sure that question really matters at a high level, but it certainly will for the specifics.

We do offer consulting. If you'd be interested in that, please email sales@nagios.com

I don't really know the details of how they on-board customers, but you might also reach out to @eloyd about consulting. While we offer consulting, it's not something we do regularly. I suspect the logistics will be easier with someone that does consulting regularly. I have no idea about costs. That's something you'd need to email sales@nagios.com about on our side.

Obviously, we can leave this open for community perspectives as well.

mcapra wrote:Does the old NMS have a way in which those workflows/tasks could be executed programatically?

If so, for each host/service in Nagios, you could configure an event handler to kick-off the associated task in the "NMS workflow bot" for problem states:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... dlers.html
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

The event handler would basically just be a script that says "start WorkflowX".

Thanks mcapra. Have you ever seen anyone "chain" event handlers in a sophisticated workflow? For instance, I get an event and:

1) Fire handlerX, get the information back
2) If info is foo, fire handler Y if handler is bar fire handler Z and so on.

I am contemplating using a third party tool to handle the sophisticated workflow, but wanted to know if this capability existed in Nagios.

Update: additionally, the current workflow engine is going to go away. So, this won't be a matter of Nagios launching an event handler to hit a workflow engine. The engine needs to be replaced entirely.

cms1cd wrote:

mcapra wrote:Does the old NMS have a way in which those workflows/tasks could be executed programatically?

If so, for each host/service in Nagios, you could configure an event handler to kick-off the associated task in the "NMS workflow bot" for problem states:
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... dlers.html
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf

The event handler would basically just be a script that says "start WorkflowX".

Thanks mcapra. Have you ever seen anyone "chain" event handlers in a sophisticated workflow? For instance, I get an event and:

1) Fire handlerX, get the information back
2) If info is foo, fire handler Y if handler is bar fire handler Z and so on.

I am contemplating using a third party tool to handle the sophisticated workflow, but wanted to know if this capability existed in Nagios.

This doesn't exists natively in Nagios however you can write this logic in a wrapper script and use that as the event handler.