Nagios for AIX servers

[raingary]

Hi,

We have a requirement where we have servers with multiple OS like (z linux, x linux and AIX ), is it possible to monitor them with a single dashboard?

As we faced issues while trying to have a dedicated server on RHEL where Nagios Core server is running and then monitoring the servers with different OS.Although it worked fine with NRPE plugins if the Nagios Core server and remote host OS matched , but failed if the remote host OS does not match.

[jsmurphy]

NRPE should be platform agnostic... the only reason I can think of why it would work on one type of OS and not the others is that you are not compiling NRPE for each OS and trying to use the same binary on all operating systems. It's definitely possible.

[raingary]

But the binaries are different for NRPE and Plugins for different OS , so how is that actually going to work for multiple platforms from one dedicated core server.

[jsmurphy]

NRPE at its heart is a message transfer and script execution mechanism... therefor it doesn't matter what OS you compile NRPE on it's still going to understand its own communication standard. I feel like there's a disconnect here between the problem you are facing and what I'm explaining, that is to say I think I'm missing the point. Could you tell me what and how you set nagios and NRPE up? On the core server and on a failing remote server.

[raingary]

We have a shared drive mounted on all the linux, aix servers , the nrpe is compiled there with the z-linux server and the nagios core server is running on a separate z linux server.
Now when we try to start NRPE from the shared drive , it starts well for z linux but not for x linux and AIX servers , giving an error message "NRPE unable to read ".
I searched on the documentation , and I found that the binaries for plugins/nrpe , required to monitor remote hosts are different for OS (linux, AIX ).
So my question is if the binaries are different for LINUX, AIX how can i monitor all the remote hosts irrespective of the OS from a single Nagios core server running on Linux.
What my understanding is that to monitor remote servers, servers should be running on the same OS as that of the remote host we want to monitor.

[jsmurphy]

You need to install a separate instance of NRPE on each server, don't use a shared drive, this will solve all your woes . We run windows, linux (Red hat, SLES, CentOS) and AIX... they all live in perfect harmony because they each have their own instances of NRPE installed.

[raingary]

Thanks for the reply.Now we will put NRPE on the individual server rather than the shared drive.
Could you please let us know the way by which the Nagios core server can handle multiple OS (Linux, AIX) remote hosts , as the plugins that need to be put on the core server to monitor remote hosts is different for each OS.

[jsmurphy]

That will largely depend on the plugin, for example Python and Perl are interpreted languages and will run on any OS as long as the language interpreter is installed (i.e the perl/python packages for that OS)... for the core nagios-plugins package, they will need to be compiled on each different OS type so they are compatible much like the NRPE package.